What if the software you’re building right now doesn’t need to exist in five years?
I know. Fun question for founders and CTOs. “Is my product a middleman with a login screen?” Great coffee chat. Stay with me.
I’m seeing four moves.
First, coding gets deskilled. Copilot, Cursor, and Claude Code move us from writing code to saying what we want and checking what comes back. Intent-specifiers. Fancy little hat, suspicious little job.
Second, the SaaS moat thins. The old pitch was, “Building this is hard, so pay us per seat forever.” When an internal tool can appear in an afternoon, the pitch wobbles.
Mid-tier project managers, form builders, light CRMs, internal dashboards – commodity stuff with no private data and no network effect – feel it first. Platforms with deep data, regulatory lock-in, or real network gravity? Different beast.
Third, agents do the work the software helped us do: Operator, Perplexity Assistant, Claude Computer Use. We move from “tool you operate” to “agent you instruct.”
Fourth, the spicy bit: software sits between intent and outcome, and agents cut out the middle. Why open a spreadsheet when an agent can track expenses and ping you about weird charges each month?
I’m not saying every app dies. I’m saying a lot of apps stop earning their chair.
If you’re feeling that low hum of, “wait, is my product the middleman?” sit with it. Not panic. Sit. Different hobby.
I wrote the longer version, including what survives and what doesn’t, in “The Extinction of Software” at clearsay.net. Oh and I built a free tool called AgentAutoFlow on GitHub if you wanna play.
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