justin-searls-co-ka38uo.txt (5605B)
1 [1] 2 justin․searls․co 3 [2][ ] 4 [3]Posts [4]Casts [5]Links [6]Shots [7]Takes [8]Tubes [9]Clips [10]Spots [11] 5 Slops [12]Mails 6 [13]About [14]Search [15] Subscribe 7 [2025-11-29] 8 ✕ 9 [17]Posts [18]Casts [19]Links [20]Shots [21]Takes [22]Tubes [23]Clips [24]Spots 10 [25]Slops [26]Mails 11 [27]About [28]Search [29] Subscribe 12 13 • [30]Work 14 • [31]GitHub 15 • [32]YouTube 16 • [33]LinkedIn 17 • [34]Instagram 18 • [35]Mastodon 19 • [36]Twitter 20 21 Tuesday, Nov 4, 2025 [37] 22 23 Software is supply-constrained (for now) 24 25 Fantastic [38]write-up by Nowfal comparing AI's current moment to the 26 Internet's dial-up era. This bit in particular points to a cleavage that far 27 too few people understand: 28 29 Software presents an even more interesting question. How many apps do you 30 need? What about software that generates applications on demand, that 31 creates entire software ecosystems autonomously? Until now, handcrafted 32 software was the constraint. Expensive software engineers and [DEL:their 33 :DEL] our labor costs limited what companies could afford to build. 34 Automation changes this equation by making those engineers far more 35 productive. Both consumer and enterprise software markets suggest 36 significant unmet demand because businesses have consistently left projects 37 unbuilt. They couldn't justify the development costs or had to allocate 38 limited resources to their top priority projects. I saw this firsthand at 39 Amazon. Thousands of ideas went unfunded not because they lacked business 40 value, but because of the lack of engineering resources to build them. If 41 AI can produce software at a fraction of the cost, that unleashes enormous 42 latent demand. The key question then is if and when that demand will 43 saturate. 44 45 Two things are simultaneously true: 46 47 1. The creation of custom software has been supply-constrained throughout the 48 entire history of computing. Nobody knows how many apps were never even 49 imagined—much less developed—due to this constraint, but it's probably fair 50 to say there's an unbelievably massive, decades-long backlog of unmet 51 demand for custom software 52 2. We aren't even six months into the [39]Shovelware era of coding agents. 53 Exceedingly few developers have even tried these things; the tooling is so 54 bad as to be counterproductive to the task; and yet experienced early 55 adopters (like me) have concluded today's mediocre agents are already 56 substantially better at writing software 57 58 It's long been my view that the appropriate response to the current moment is 59 to ride this walrus and leverage coding agents to increase the scope of our 60 ambitions. By the time software demand has been saturated and put us out of 61 jobs, the supply of programmers will already have tapered off as the next 62 generation sees the inflection point coming. 63 64 In the short term, the only programmers actually losing their jobs to "AI" are 65 those who refuse to engage with the technology. Using coding agents effectively 66 is a learned skill like any other—and if you don't keep your skills current, 67 fewer people will want to hire you. 68 69 [40] wreflection.com 70 ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 71 72 Got a taste for hot, fresh takes? 73 74 Then you're in luck, because you'll pay $0 for my 2¢ when you [41]subscribe to 75 my work, whether via [42]RSS or your favorite [43]social network. 76 77 I also have a monthly [44]newsletter where I write high-tempo, 78 thought-provoking essays about life, in case that's more your speed: 79 80 [45][ ] [46][Sign up] 81 And if you'd rather give your eyes a rest and your ears a workout, might I 82 suggest my long-form solo podcast, [47]Breaking Change? Odds are, you haven't 83 heard anything quite like it. 84 85 © 2025 Justin Searls. All rights reserved. 86 87 88 References: 89 90 [1] https://justin.searls.co/ 91 [3] https://justin.searls.co/posts/ 92 [4] https://justin.searls.co/casts/ 93 [5] https://justin.searls.co/links/ 94 [6] https://justin.searls.co/shots/ 95 [7] https://justin.searls.co/takes/ 96 [8] https://justin.searls.co/tubes/ 97 [9] https://justin.searls.co/clips/ 98 [10] https://justin.searls.co/spots/ 99 [11] https://justin.searls.co/slops/ 100 [12] https://justin.searls.co/mails/ 101 [13] https://justin.searls.co/about/ 102 [14] https://justin.searls.co/search/ 103 [15] https://justin.searls.co/subscribe/ 104 [17] https://justin.searls.co/posts/ 105 [18] https://justin.searls.co/casts/ 106 [19] https://justin.searls.co/links/ 107 [20] https://justin.searls.co/shots/ 108 [21] https://justin.searls.co/takes/ 109 [22] https://justin.searls.co/tubes/ 110 [23] https://justin.searls.co/clips/ 111 [24] https://justin.searls.co/spots/ 112 [25] https://justin.searls.co/slops/ 113 [26] https://justin.searls.co/mails/ 114 [27] https://justin.searls.co/about/ 115 [28] https://justin.searls.co/search/ 116 [29] https://justin.searls.co/subscribe/ 117 [30] https://searls.co/ 118 [31] https://github.com/searls 119 [32] https://youtube.com/@JustinSearls 120 [33] https://linkedin.com/in/searls 121 [34] https://instagram.com/searls 122 [35] https://mastodon.social/@searls 123 [36] https://twitter.com/searls 124 [37] https://www.wreflection.com/p/ai-dial-up-era 125 [38] https://www.wreflection.com/p/ai-dial-up-era 126 [39] https://justin.searls.co/shovelware/ 127 [40] https://www.wreflection.com/p/ai-dial-up-era 128 [41] https://justin.searls.co/subscribe/ 129 [42] https://justin.searls.co/rss/ 130 [43] https://justin.searls.co/posse/ 131 [44] https://justin.searls.co/newsletter 132 [47] https://justin.searls.co/casts/breaking-change/