justin-searls-co-y5dsjo.txt (5588B)
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 [16]Posts [17]Casts [18]Links [19]Shots [20]Takes [21]Tubes [22]Clips [23]Spots 8 [24]Slops [25]Mails 9 [26]About [27]Search [28] Subscribe 10 11 • [29]Work 12 • [30]GitHub 13 • [31]YouTube 14 • [32]LinkedIn 15 • [33]Instagram 16 • [34]Mastodon 17 • [35]Twitter 18 19 Tuesday, Nov 4, 2025 [36] 20 21 Software is supply-constrained (for now) 22 23 Fantastic [37]write-up by Nowfal comparing AI's current moment to the 24 Internet's dial-up era. This bit in particular points to a cleavage that far 25 too few people understand: 26 27 Software presents an even more interesting question. How many apps do you 28 need? What about software that generates applications on demand, that 29 creates entire software ecosystems autonomously? Until now, handcrafted 30 software was the constraint. Expensive software engineers and [DEL:their 31 :DEL] our labor costs limited what companies could afford to build. 32 Automation changes this equation by making those engineers far more 33 productive. Both consumer and enterprise software markets suggest 34 significant unmet demand because businesses have consistently left projects 35 unbuilt. They couldn't justify the development costs or had to allocate 36 limited resources to their top priority projects. I saw this firsthand at 37 Amazon. Thousands of ideas went unfunded not because they lacked business 38 value, but because of the lack of engineering resources to build them. If 39 AI can produce software at a fraction of the cost, that unleashes enormous 40 latent demand. The key question then is if and when that demand will 41 saturate. 42 43 Two things are simultaneously true: 44 45 1. The creation of custom software has been supply-constrained throughout the 46 entire history of computing. Nobody knows how many apps were never even 47 imagined—much less developed—due to this constraint, but it's probably fair 48 to say there's an unbelievably massive, decades-long backlog of unmet 49 demand for custom software 50 2. We aren't even six months into the [38]Shovelware era of coding agents. 51 Exceedingly few developers have even tried these things; the tooling is so 52 bad as to be counterproductive to the task; and yet experienced early 53 adopters (like me) have concluded today's mediocre agents are already 54 substantially better at writing software 55 56 It's long been my view that the appropriate response to the current moment is 57 to ride this walrus and leverage coding agents to increase the scope of our 58 ambitions. By the time software demand has been saturated and put us out of 59 jobs, the supply of programmers will already have tapered off as the next 60 generation sees the inflection point coming. 61 62 In the short term, the only programmers actually losing their jobs to "AI" are 63 those who refuse to engage with the technology. Using coding agents effectively 64 is a learned skill like any other—and if you don't keep your skills current, 65 fewer people will want to hire you. 66 67 [39] wreflection.com 68 ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 69 70 Got a taste for hot, fresh takes? 71 72 Then you're in luck, because you'll pay $0 for my 2¢ when you [40]subscribe to 73 my work, whether via [41]RSS or your favorite [42]social network. 74 75 I also have a monthly [43]newsletter where I write high-tempo, 76 thought-provoking essays about life, in case that's more your speed: 77 78 [44][ ] [45][Sign up] 79 And if you'd rather give your eyes a rest and your ears a workout, might I 80 suggest my long-form solo podcast, [46]Breaking Change? Odds are, you haven't 81 heard anything quite like it. 82 83 © 2025 Justin Searls. All rights reserved. 84 85 86 References: 87 88 [1] https://justin.searls.co/ 89 [3] https://justin.searls.co/posts/ 90 [4] https://justin.searls.co/casts/ 91 [5] https://justin.searls.co/links/ 92 [6] https://justin.searls.co/shots/ 93 [7] https://justin.searls.co/takes/ 94 [8] https://justin.searls.co/tubes/ 95 [9] https://justin.searls.co/clips/ 96 [10] https://justin.searls.co/spots/ 97 [11] https://justin.searls.co/slops/ 98 [12] https://justin.searls.co/mails/ 99 [13] https://justin.searls.co/about/ 100 [14] https://justin.searls.co/search/ 101 [15] https://justin.searls.co/subscribe/ 102 [16] https://justin.searls.co/posts/ 103 [17] https://justin.searls.co/casts/ 104 [18] https://justin.searls.co/links/ 105 [19] https://justin.searls.co/shots/ 106 [20] https://justin.searls.co/takes/ 107 [21] https://justin.searls.co/tubes/ 108 [22] https://justin.searls.co/clips/ 109 [23] https://justin.searls.co/spots/ 110 [24] https://justin.searls.co/slops/ 111 [25] https://justin.searls.co/mails/ 112 [26] https://justin.searls.co/about/ 113 [27] https://justin.searls.co/search/ 114 [28] https://justin.searls.co/subscribe/ 115 [29] https://searls.co/ 116 [30] https://github.com/searls 117 [31] https://youtube.com/@JustinSearls 118 [32] https://linkedin.com/in/searls 119 [33] https://instagram.com/searls 120 [34] https://mastodon.social/@searls 121 [35] https://twitter.com/searls 122 [36] https://www.wreflection.com/p/ai-dial-up-era 123 [37] https://www.wreflection.com/p/ai-dial-up-era 124 [38] https://justin.searls.co/shovelware/ 125 [39] https://www.wreflection.com/p/ai-dial-up-era 126 [40] https://justin.searls.co/subscribe/ 127 [41] https://justin.searls.co/rss/ 128 [42] https://justin.searls.co/posse/ 129 [43] https://justin.searls.co/newsletter 130 [46] https://justin.searls.co/casts/breaking-change/