From SaaS to Agents: Skip the Software Already

Published 2026-05-02 00-52

Summary

AI is shrinking the gap between wanting something and getting it done. SaaS made software less painful; agents skip the software and just do the chore.

The story

AI-ish tells I’d sand down:
– Too tidy: SaaS → assistants → agents. Real change has more spaghetti.
– Generic polish: “lowered the floor,” “ground move,” “intent-to-outcome pipelines.”
– Lists are accurate but sterile; they need one human image.
– Big claims arrive with no wink or counterweight.
– The transition announces itself: “part that gets weirder.”

🟢 Before: You Opened an App. After: You Asked.

Remember when building software was a pain? That pain was the moat. SaaS companies charged monthly, per person, because the other option was hiring a team, waiting forever, and aging into dust while people argued about buttons.

Then Copilot, Cursor, and Claude Code showed up. They didn’t make software easy. They made the first step smaller. The human job started moving from typing every line to saying what we want, then checking what came back. “Nice spreadsheet, robot. Why does it have haunted columns?”

Mid-tier SaaS is feeling it first: project trackers, form builders, internal dashboards, plain CRMs. Tools with samey features and no special data or built-in crowd look shaky. Why pay forever for the plain version when you can make one in an afternoon?

Agents like OpenAI Operator, Perplexity Assistant, and Claude Computer Use get stranger. They aren’t building the app. They’re doing the chore the app was supposed to help with.

Before: open spreadsheet, set up columns, enter expenses, build formulas, stare at it each month.
After: “Track my expenses and flag anything weird each month.”

Software has been the middle layer between “I want this” and “it got done.” Agents shrink the gap. The question changes from “How do I use the tool?” to “Can you handle this?”

If you’re a founder, CTO, or developer feeling the floor wobble, yay, you’re not losing your mind. The thing being built is less apps and more paths from intent to outcome. Ugly phrase. Useful idea.

I wro

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/