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Monday, May 26, 2025

Software Ate the World. Now AI Is Eating Software.

 

Software Ate the World. Now AI Is Eating Software.

In 2011, Marc Andreessen famously declared that “software is eating the world.” And he was right. Over the next decade, nearly every industry was digitized, disrupted, or demolished by software. From how we shop to how we bank, from how we communicate to how we date, software became the invisible infrastructure of modern life. Every company became, in part, a software company.

But something new is happening now.

AI is eating software.

The New Eater Emerges

Artificial Intelligence, particularly large language models (LLMs), generative AI, and autonomous agents, are transforming how software is built, deployed, and even conceptualized. AI isn’t just another software tool—it’s a new layer that sits above software development itself.

Where once humans wrote code, now AI can generate it. Where once we had to meticulously design workflows, AI can infer and optimize them in real-time. AI doesn’t just use software—it writes, fixes, tests, and even replaces it.

From Apps to Agents

Apps used to be the endpoint of software innovation. You needed a team of developers to build a new productivity app, or a customer support system, or a recommendation engine. Now, an LLM can spin up an AI agent that handles all of that, learning as it goes.

Instead of building a CRM, businesses are deploying AI agents that are the CRM—automatically conversing with clients, managing data, summarizing interactions, and improving with every customer touchpoint.

We’re moving from a world of static software products to dynamic, self-improving, conversational systems.

Zero UI, Zero Code, Infinite Potential

AI is beginning to erode the traditional interfaces of software. Why click buttons and navigate menus when you can just say what you want?

Want a new dashboard? Tell your AI agent.

Need an email campaign launched, a spreadsheet analyzed, a bug fixed? Just describe the problem in plain English.

In this world, the real power isn’t in knowing how to code—it’s in knowing how to communicate. Prompting is the new programming. And anyone can prompt.

Implications: The Developer's Role Evolves

Developers are not becoming obsolete—they are becoming conductors rather than technicians. AI handles the repetitive, boilerplate code. Developers steer, architect, and integrate. More focus shifts to system design, governance, ethics, and human-AI collaboration.

Meanwhile, millions who were previously excluded from software creation now have tools to build, automate, and create at the speed of thought.

Beyond Software: Eating the World, Again

If software ate the world by digitizing it, AI is now reimagining it. AI is poised to redefine what’s possible in medicine, education, law, entertainment, science, and even governance.

It’s not just eating software—it’s reshaping intelligence itself.

Conclusion:

Software once transformed industries. Now AI is transforming software.

We’re not witnessing an incremental shift—we’re witnessing a recursive one: intelligence building intelligence, software creating software, and ideas becoming products without the friction of traditional development.

It’s not the end of software.

It’s the beginning of something much bigger.

The frontier tech prisoners dilemma

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