From the Jobsite to the App Store

When I started telling people I was "doing apps," they'd look at me funny. Why don't you go back to something you know you can make good money at?

Fair question. Two careers, twenty-five years between them — behavior analysis and general contracting. Real work. Good money. And here I am choosing to morph my construction company into a software company because of what I see happening with AI.

Wait, hear me out.

Where this is coming from

Huuuuuuuuh (deep breath). My construction company — Tree City Design Build Renovate — was built on the idea that you can't build well if you don't understand the people living in the house and the systems holding it together. That was true, and the work was good.

But things are shifting, and they feel crazy, and scary. I could go back to what I know — but I'm not so sure that's the safe move anymore.

My reasoning comes down to two things:

1. My two careers were vastly different fields with an all too similar common experience: Work sucks, but work REALLY sucks when it has core problems with crappy solutions. As a behavior analyst, I tried to improve supports for parents and other professionals. But trying to get parents and teachers to behave as professional interventionists was... let's call it a losing battle. As a general contractor I was the parent/teacher who didn't have time to put the tools down and do the big software — I didn't use the software because it didn't really work for my situation, or had requirements that gated me out.

2. You've heard the pitch by now. "Try our new AI." Accounting "powered by AI." Use AI, use AI, USE AI! Everyone's shouting about it. The media calls it the coming "white collar apocalypse." Most of that noise is just noise. But underneath it, something real is happening. It seems like water over a dam made of sand. A trickle right now. Easy to ignore. But water pulls sand, and sand makes room for more water, and that process "goes exponential." The old ways of doing business are already starting to crumble. Give it a few years and the dam won't even be visible anymore. And as I started to "Use AI" myself, I could feel the current. It was flattening the differences between well-funded industry giants and focused startups, between software development teams and scrappy individuals. And it made me come to believe that one person with real expertise and a laptop could begin to ship apps that solved real problems in everyday fields like construction and intervention.

And so I asked myself: why go backwards? You know the economy is shifting around you. Staying with what you know seems as risky as stepping into the unknown. So the choice I'm making is to ride the wave, not be crushed by it.

Why I believe this will work

"Why? You're not a software engineer." I hear you. And the market would seem saturated. And I'm still finishing cabinet installs and sweeping up sawdust and getting my kid to practice damn near every night. Believing that AI will compensate for what should have been five-plus years of college and an apprentice path through the ranks of app development — it seems more than silly when I say it like that.

But here's what I do know.

In this current wave of consumer apps, only a small percent actually solve real problems. Most of what's out there spawned from old software engineering limitations and was targeted at what funding would support — built to be good enough to capture money from as broad an audience as possible. The majority of apps on the App Store are watered-down, often glitchy, "dumb" apps with UI that keeps the user in the "doer" role and the computer in the "passive" role. What looks like a saturated market, to me really looks like an app store littered with obsolete, and frankly kinda poor tools for where I come from. It's a sea of dodo birds that just don't know they are extinct yet.

Sure there are contractor apps. But they're built by people who have never set foot on a jobsite, and most are limited to the billing and organizational side because it was low-hanging fruit. Sure there are intervention apps, but most step over the actual science to satisfy the UI limitations of the era they were designed in. To say it bluntly, apps like this are 50% solutions, not actual solutions. The inputs are wrong, the outputs aren't really useful, and they assume you're desperate enough to pay for something that has you, the user, coming the other 50% of the way.

I know because I bought three different construction calculators — the first two were apps and the last was the old school TI calculator that at least I knew would work. I honestly can't count the number of data collection apps I've used in behavior work, the majority of which I watched parents or teachers try and ignore completely.

The trend in app development has been better UI to draw in more purchases. And the result is comment sections littered with less than satisfied customers. I think that's because most folks don't have problems you solve with better UI.

The contractor who bids a job wrong doesn't need a prettier interface — he needs a tool built for his actual trade that fits the way he works and the way he organizes his truck and runs his jobsite. The family that can't get their kid to school on time doesn't need software that spews parenting advice at them — they need something that actually accounts for how chaotic mornings are and uses the science to help them effect change where it is needed most.

And after some early experimentation, it seems clear to me that with the tools AI puts at our fingertips now, it doesn't have to be like that anymore.

Here's the thing about both my previous fields: In both cases, the less the tool requires of you, the better it becomes. When you're framing it sucks to stop your flow to do math. When your kid is in the middle of a meltdown you can't slow the situation to make sure you log the data correctly. To me that says something about why apps get ignored — not because people are lazy, but because the apps demand you stop doing the work in order to use the tool that's supposed to help you do the work.

AI seems to be creating an opportunity to begin flipping that relationship. Instead of you learning to navigate the tool, AI is allowing us to build tools that learn to navigate us. Imagine a contractor talking to his phone while he's walking across the deck: "What's the length of a common rafter with a 28 ft span and a 6/12 pitch?" — no stopping and putting down his work to input numbers into a calculator. He verbally gets an answer in fractions, ready for the tape, while he walks to his saw. Imagine a parent debriefing the breakfast meltdown with a chatbot while they drive to work. The app codes the behavior, the parent sorts through their choices and vents all at the same time. The human stays in the moment. The computer does the professional-grade thinking.

That's not a UI upgrade. That's a complete inversion of who does the work.

Which brings me to the thing I keep thinking about. The story everyone is telling about AI right now is about displacement — corporations cutting headcount, entire job categories disappearing, a hollowing out of the professional class. And that story is real. But I don't think it has to be the only one.

AI just erased the advantages that used to belong to the well-funded and the corporations. Someone with real expertise and a laptop can now start canning what they know into tools that actually work. A nurse can build something small that makes a real dent in her daily workflow. A teacher can build the classroom app that actually understands how classrooms work. And a contractor can take the field math he's been doing in his head for twenty years and put it in an app that works the way he thinks. The gap between knowing the problem and building the fix just got small enough to step across.

That's the bet I'm making — niche expertise married to AI, stepping over the sea of mediocre apps to build tools that actually finish the job. Where the computer does the work and the human stays in the moment. One problem at a time.

This blog is where I'm going to write about how that goes — the real version, not the highlight reel. If you're watching this moment from the trades, or social work, or teaching, or anywhere that doesn't look like tech, you might find something useful here. Or you might just watch me make some spectacular mistakes. Either way, I'm leaving the door open in case someone else wants to walk through.