Architecture Posts

Day three. Another SaaS subscription, another Single Serving Application. I've now replaced Harvest (time tracking) and Trello (project management) with AI-generated clones. Today's target: Confluence -- Atlassian's knowledge management and wiki platform. Claude Opus 4.6 built a fully functional Confluence clone in 16 minutes, consuming 106,000 tokens. That's the fastest build yet -- down from 18 minutes for Harvest and 19 for Trello. The pattern is holding: requirements in, working application out, no human intervention needed.

Last week I had Claude Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.3-Codex race to build a Harvest clone. Claude won decisively. That experiment killed a $180/year SaaS subscription. Naturally, I started looking at my other subscriptions. Trello was next on the list. I've used it for years to manage personal projects, product roadmaps, and random ideas. It's a great product -- but it's also a multi-tenant, collaboration-heavy platform where I use maybe 20% of the features. A perfect candidate for a Single Serving Application. So I wrote a requirements document, handed it to Claude Opus 4.6, and walked away. 19 minutes and 137,000 tokens later, I had a fully functional Kanban board running on localhost.

I recently built a Harvest clone in 18 minutes, a Trello clone in 19 minutes, and a Confluence clone in 16 minutes. All three were generated entirely by Claude Opus 4.6 from requirements documents. All run in Docker. All work.

I'm systematically replacing my SaaS subscriptions with Single Serving Applications -- purpose-built, AI-generated apps designed for an audience of one. Each clone is built by Claude Opus 4.6 from a requirements document, runs via Docker Compose, and costs essentially nothing to operate.

I recently had two AI models build a complete Harvest clone in under 20 minutes. The winning version covered 97% of Harvest's features. I'm seriously considering canceling my $180/year subscription and using it instead. That experiment got me thinking about something bigger than one app replacement. We're entering an era where a competent engineer with an AI coding assistant can generate a fully functional web application from a requirements document in the time it takes to eat lunch. That changes the economics of software in a fundamental way.