Software is becoming the middleman nobody asked for. Agents are quietly eating the chore-app crowd. Bless their renewal emails.
The story
AI-ish tells:
– Same punchy fragments repeat.
– The four-move list feels too tidy.
– Abstract startup words stack up.
– CTA sounds like promo copy.
– Needs messier human images.
Rewrite:
🟢 Software is becoming the middleman nobody asked for
Hot take: most software won’t get replaced by better software. It’ll get skipped. Rude, but there it is.
Apps used to sit between *wanting a thing* and *getting it done*. Expenses? Spreadsheet. Invoices? Purple-logo app, tiny hidden button, tiny soul tax. The app was the middleman.
Agents are eating the middleman.
If I can say, “track my expenses and flag weird stuff each month,” and the system handles the clicks, the spreadsheet becomes optional. Not improved. Optional.
I’m seeing four moves: coding gets less magical; subscription-software moats dry up when the moat was “annoying to build”; agents click through apps for us; then plenty of apps stop earning their chair.
The survivors have private data, network effects, legal lock-in, or execution people trust. The exposed ones are mid-tier chore tools: form builders, dashboards, generic project trackers. The polite seat-license crowd. Bless their renewal emails.
Software used to answer, “How do I do this?” Agents make that question kinda boring. The new question: “What outcome do I want, what are the limits, and do I trust the thing doing it?”
Different game. Different moats. Different products. Different work for humans.
If you’re a founder, CTO, or dev hearing “uh oh, am I building a middleman?” I wrote a longer piece called “The Extinction of Software.” If you wanna sit with the discomfort, it’s there.
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