That is the central finding of Emergent’s Age of Custom Software Index 2026, published this week by the AI software platform Emergent and based on 300 structured interviews with operators alongside a sample of more than 50,000 live, deployed applications built on the vibecoding platform. The full Emergent Index 2026, including industry portraits, verbatim operator prompts, nine named operator stories and the complete methodology appendix, is available at smb-report.emergent.sh. About EmergentEmergent is an AI software creation platform that lets people build full-stack, production-ready web and mobile applications using autonomous AI agents. MethodologyThe index draws on two sources - the first is Emergent platform data covering a sample of more than 50,000 applications that were live and deployed as of the report snapshot. Every operator surveyed had already chosen to build custom software, so the findings describe the population of people who built rather than small businesses generally.