For quite some time, I was a strong believer of Marc Andreessen’s dictum “Software is eating the world”. Everything that can be transformed into code and run on some kind of machine, eventually will be. And I think he was pretty right so far. As long as the AI winters kept coming, software had no natural enemy.

But this all changed, when suddenly, computing power, training data (= “Big Big Data”) and human imagination met and created the first Large Language Models that really felt like AI could do something useful and exceed human capabilities in some areas.

But, boy, they grow up so fast!

Only a few years into public LLM history, these models are no longer confined to creating strange cocktail recipes, highly imaginative endnotes or summarizing texts with lots of em dashes (or visualizing the mighty Crungus). They can code. And because software was eating the world, AI now just has to eat software in order to eat the world.

Whether you are a fan of Vibe Coding or think this will never work, suddenly the respect for software has been vaporized. With automated coding agents we all understand in a very practical way that software is just code that almost nobody understands unless it is super documented (which I’ve almost never seen in real life). Need an iPhone-App? Start with the specs and let a coding agent implement your specs. Need a BASIC interpreter? Vibe it. Need an alternative coding agent that works like Claude Code but has some extra features like sharing contexts with your coworkers? Spec it till you make it.

It will be interesting to see how and why in a few years, anybody will still pay money for software when you can just create it yourself. It can be frustrating at first, and very frustrating a few hours later, but in the end — mindblowing. Happy coding!