~ 2 min read
By 9:02 a.m. today I’d already seen two different screenshot apps in my feeds. One was a completely new app and one reverse engineered from another. Oh joy!
Right now we’re getting completely bombarded by people creating their own ‘personal software’. That is software that we ourselves create in order to better suit our personal needs, that replaces something else.
One of these is screenshot apps, that dress up boring screenshots for social networks using various templates and effects. And right now, they’re all over the place. They’re a type of app that I think is relatively easy and low risk for somebody to build.
I’m Sorry, How Many? #
I’m going to use screenshot apps as a benchmark for quite how much personal software is being created. This chart shows the number of screenshot apps that have been created per month as GitHub repositories over time and whether or not AI was detected as a contributor. You can see how quickly this has ramped up since Claude Code was released back in February of 2025.
If you want inspect the data Claude gathered for this, I’ve added it as a gist. In September 2026, 201 screenshot apps were created and published to Github. This is up 22x from just 9 in September of 2025. That’s 1112 over the past year. What’s even more interesting is the split between them. Obviously before Claude Code existed, there were less contributions from AI. Since then a large proportion of the contributions are and that obviously doesn’t even include the ones that are removing AI attribution.
People seem very happy to give up their existing software and accept the responsibility of the maintenance burden that comes with having to develop all of their own applications. Or maybe that’s just developers.
I don’t know how many of these applications the world needs, but devs at least are happy continuing to burn tokens and churning apps out to dump on GitHub for no one to look at.