Week of October 12 2026

A man paying twenty thousand dollars a year for software got tired of waiting on the support line — so he rebuilt the thing himself with AI. McKinsey says about a third of companies did some version of that this year. Meanwhile a security firm found thousands of these homemade apps sitting open on the internet, including a cabinet supplier's conversations with its own customers. Both are true. Building got cheap. Owning didn't. And a shop your size has been building its own software for years — you just call it a spreadsheet.

In this episode:

• A third of companies skipped the software bill and built it themselves. McKinsey's annual AI survey: about a third decided against buying a piece of software because they could build it in-house with AI — nearly half among its top performers. The fine print: that's mostly big companies with IT departments. If you skip the purchase, you just hired yourself as the support line. The question isn't "can we build it?" It's who fixes it on the Tuesday it breaks.
• The homemade app worked fine. It was also on the open internet. Axios, back in May: 380,000 apps and sites built with type-what-you-want tools were publicly reachable, about 5,000 with sensitive company data — including a cabinet supplier's full customer service conversations. Nobody got hacked. The door was never closed.
• The builder moved into Patty's spreadsheet. Last week Claude showed up as a side panel inside Google Sheets (beta, paid plans from $20/mo). It writes the formulas, builds the summary, and asks before every change. Before anybody builds you an app, fix the spreadsheet you already run on.
• Spotlight — Lovable vs. Google AppSheet: two ways to build one small tool your field software doesn't do. Describe it and AI writes a brand-new app (Lovable — $25/mo; on that plan anyone with the link can open what you publish) vs. snap an app onto a Google Sheet (AppSheet — included in most Google Workspace Business plans, otherwise $10/user). Which for which job, when to buy instead, and when to skip both.
• The Operator's Move (tool-free): "Find the three homemade spreadsheets your shop runs on." Who built each one, who else could fix it, where's the second copy — and who's on the Share list.

🔗 Show Notes & Sources

Story 1 — A third skipped the software bill

• McKinsey — "The state of AI in 2026: On the road to ROI"
• Retool — "The Build vs. Buy Shift"

Story 2 — The homemade app on the open internet

• Axios — "AI vibe-coding apps leak sensitive data"

Story 3 — The builder in the spreadsheet

• Anthropic — "Claude now works with Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides"
• Claude pricing
• Quartz — "Google launches universal Gemini AI agent for enterprise work"

Spotlight — Lovable vs. Google AppSheet

• Lovable — Pricing
• Lovable docs — who can see a published app, by plan
• Google AppSheet — Pricing
• Google Workspace Help — which Workspace editions include AppSheet Core