Are We Reinventing the Wheel?

In an age where AI makes building an app as easy as describing one, the question isn't whether you can build something — it's whether you should.

The Age of AI and the App Flood

We are living through a genuinely strange moment in software. Building an app — something that once required months of specialized work — can now be prototyped in an afternoon. AI tools write the code, generate the UI, suggest the architecture. The barrier to shipping something has never been lower.

This is mostly a good thing. But it has created a real problem: a flood of products that exist not because someone had a burning need, but because someone had a free weekend and access to an AI assistant.

Before building anything, ask yourself honestly: if someone else created another Facebook, another YouTube, another Google Maps — would you use it? Or would it just be noise?

The answer is almost certainly: no. Not because those teams aren't talented, but because the problem is already solved. A new social network doesn't fix a problem you have. It just adds clutter to an already crowded space.

So the honest test for any new product is this: are you solving a problem that existing tools are not solving properly — or not solving at all? A general-purpose tool can never be as sharp as a specific-purpose tool at the specific thing it's designed for. That's not a weakness of general tools — it's a trade-off by design. The question is whether the specific gap is real enough to matter.

For Merge Planner, we believe the answer is yes. Here is the moment that made it obvious.

Born at a Library, in the Rain

That afternoon made something obvious that had been easy to ignore: how dependent daily life had become on accounts, logins, and credentials — and how poorly that dependency was handled the moment you stepped away from your primary device.

Notes in iCloud. Links saved in a browser tied to a Google account. Todos and references in Notion. Calendar in a separate service. Not one of these tools offered a way to access your data on a shared machine without putting your credentials into it.

And this wasn't only a "library problem." The same friction showed up every time a work computer needed a personal note, or a personal laptop needed a link that had been saved at work. The dependency on personal accounts — and the awkwardness of logging into them in the wrong context — was a daily, low-grade problem that nobody had solved.

That was the moment Merge Planner started to make sense as something worth building.

This Is What Merge Planner Was Built to Fix

The core idea was straightforward: a single place for the things you actually reach for every day — notes, links, todos, calendar — that you can access from any device, without entering credentials to do it.

The same logic solves the work/personal computer split — a version of the same problem that appears every single day. Your bookmarks, your notes, your saved links: they are locked inside accounts that feel wrong to open on the wrong machine. Merge Planner removes that dependency entirely.

The real problem was never "I need another productivity app." It was: my data is tied to whichever device I last used — and there is no clean way out of that.

Merge Planner vs Notion

Notion is a genuinely excellent product. For teams, for project management, for documentation and knowledge bases, it is hard to beat. This is not a takedown. But the comparison is instructive precisely because Notion is the tool most people would reach for first — and yet it leaves the problems above completely unaddressed.

Notion requires a full account login on every device. It was optimized for professional workspaces, not personal daily life. Its mobile app is a secondary experience built on top of a web-first architecture. And it has no equivalent of QR-based access, remote session control, or the specific design of personal-plus-shared space that daily life actually needs.

The table tells the story clearly. Notion wins at what it was built for. Merge Planner wins at what it was built for. These are not the same problem.

Should We Be Worried About Too Many New Products?

It is a fair concern. App stores are already overwhelming. AI is about to flood them further. If building is this easy, won't everything just become noise?

The market has always had an answer for this — and it is not a gentle one. Products that solve no real problem do not survive. Not because of regulation or gatekeeping, but simply because nobody uses them. They disappear quietly.

Consider what happened in the mobile phone market in the early 2000s. Dozens of competing manufacturers — Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, BlackBerry — were all making variations of essentially the same device. The market looked impossibly crowded. And yet the biggest disruption didn't come from within that crowd. It came from a completely different direction, because the existing players had stopped asking the real question.

Nokia was the largest mobile phone manufacturer in the world. Then it wasn't. Not because the market got too crowded — but because it stopped solving the problem its users actually had.

The iPhone didn't win by being a better Nokia. It won by redefining what the problem was. Nokia kept making the product it was comfortable making, while the world moved on to a different need entirely. Nokia's failure wasn't competition — it was irrelevance.

The market, over time, is remarkably good at this. Products that exist only because building is easy get abandoned. Products that solve something real — something that wasn't being solved well before — find their users and survive. A crowded market is not the danger. Building something that doesn't answer the fundamental question is the danger: who needs this, and why doesn't what already exists work for them?

For Merge Planner, we have answered that question — at least for ourselves, and based on feedback from early users, for a growing number of others. The rain, the library, the chain of logins, the quiet dread of not knowing if you closed every tab on a public machine: that problem is real, it is daily, and it was not being solved.