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What does Airplane look like if everything goes well and how does the world transform as a result in the next 5 years?
Ravi Parikh
Co-founder & CEO at Airplane
Today, with Airplane, we have the set of building blocks: tasks, views, workflows, etc., that lets you create powerful internal tools with a lot less work than you would've had to otherwise. You write a lot less code, but still have full extensibility.
The fundamental concept stays the same for a while. Probably we do interesting things like storage and other building blocks that further expand the variety of apps that can be built in Airplane. What will happen with both Airplane and the world is that software is going to get significantly easier to write due to things like LLMs. That will dovetail really nicely with the way Airplane is built. Airplane is a code-based platform. As code gets easier to write and create, something like Airplane will get exponentially easier to spin up.
Right now, if it takes you 20 hours to build the app that you want from scratch, maybe it takes you three hours to do so in Airplane. Five years from now, it'll be a world where that same thing will take you five minutes in a combination of Airplane plus LLMs and things like that.
You'll get a world where when app creation is that easy, where building internal tools and things like that is that simple, you'll see things like Airplane fill more and more of the gaps where off-the-shelf SaaS doesn't work. You'll also see where people are like, "Well, I could procure off-the-shelf SaaS for this, or I could just build a slightly more bespoke version of it than I need using Airplane" because of how easy creation will become. You'll actually see things like Airplane replace a lot more dedicated SaaS vendors because you'll be, "Well, I could buy that thing,” or “I could just not buy that thing and use this platform I already have, build something in there that's actually a better fit for my needs anyways."
That's the thing I might see in five years but I don't know. The world's about to get really weird, so it's hard for me to predict.
