Agents Killed the Spreadsheet, What’s Next for Apps

Published 2026-05-01 17-53

Summary

Before agents, you fought spreadsheets. Now you tell a robot friend “watch my expenses.” If agents finish the job, what’s the app for?

The story

*AI-ish tells:* tidy four-phase ladder; big market label like “extinction event”; tool-name pileup; targeted “founders and CTOs” line; promo-ish link stack.

🟢 Before: Software Was the Answer. After: Agents Make the Question Weird.

Before, if I wanted to track expenses, I launched a spreadsheet, fought formulas, and felt proud of my tiny math dungeon. Yay, adulthood.

Now? I tell an agent, “watch my expenses and flag the weird stuff.” No app. No license per human. No cartoon mascot.

That’s the shift I’m chewing on.

First: coding got easier to boss around. Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code – the floor dropped. We moved from typing every line to saying, “make it do this, little robot friend.”

Second: subscription software gets awkward. The old moat was “building software is hard.” When a team can make its own tracker, form, or dashboard in an afternoon, paying for every user starts feeling like renting a flip phone.

Still, some tools have armor: huge communities, private data, or rules nobody wants to touch. Middle-shelf lookalike tools? Yikes.

Third: agents do the job, not the tool-making. Operator, Perplexity Assistant, Claude Computer Use. You stop operating software and start instructing a worker.

Fourth is the spicy one. If an agent finishes the task, the app that “helps you finish the task” becomes a middleman asking for applause. Software used to answer, “how do I do this?” Agents make the question weird.

For founders and CTOs feeling the cold lizard up the spine: same. I’m not calling doom from my prophecy cave. I’m wondering what we build when our old main thing stops being the point.

I wrote “The Extinction of Software” at clearsay.net. AgentAutoFlow is on GitHub, my little heavy-lifting helper, plus an animated musical story about what comes next.

What are you feeling about it?

For more from The Extinction of Software, visit
https://clearsay.net/the-extinction-of-software/.

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts, private keys, feelings, threats, and shouts of rage!

Based on https://clearsay.net/the-extinction-of-software/