Consumers are unlikely to want to build their own software even if it's "easy" with AI. It doesn't really make sense to spend all that time vibe coding instead of paying $10/month for most people.
Businesses are more likely to build than buy, yes, but as we know from "Theory of the Firm" there are limits to this, it's not going to be correct to build _everything_.
So I mainly expect it to change what type of software gets sold, not the fact that it gets sold in the first place.
There's a lot of saas that costs a whole lot more than $10 a month and doesn't work exactly the way you'd want it to. Then it becomes very tempting to vibe code your own
> Then it becomes very tempting to vibe code your own
What about the Wall, though? The Wall (tm) is when you vibe code the software through prompts, and at some point, the accumulated cruft means that you no longer understand enough of the codebase/approaches to give useful feedback, so you delegate more to the LLM, then your costs keep increasing and eventually you hit The Wall (tm) where you can't make forward progress without breaking something else.
The models have definitely improved (i used to hit the wall in one session, now its generally weeks), but I'm currently working on a ridiculous tool replacement where even the creator has hit said wall.
Coding may be solved, but maintenance and maintainability (particularly where the software needs to be accurate) are definitely not.
We'll probably end up with the same number of software people doing a lot more.
Eventually, we'll end up in a world where custom software is mostly building harnesses and verification tools to ensure that the agents actually build the correct thing.
And we'll always need someone to interface between the users and the software, as most users don't really know what they want (c.f. faster horse etc), so the jobs will change but are vanishingly unlikely to go away (modulo the immanence of the machine god, but that seems unlikely).
Restaurants exist despite grocery stores selling ingredients. Thing is, I need to eat every day and food goes bad. Software that I need to use doesn't decay in the same way.
Star Trek Replicators need near-infinite energy sources to work, which we don't have. Frozen food still needs to come from somewhere. You still pay for Hot Pockets or Stoffers or Picards.
Businesses are more likely to build than buy, yes, but as we know from "Theory of the Firm" there are limits to this, it's not going to be correct to build _everything_.
So I mainly expect it to change what type of software gets sold, not the fact that it gets sold in the first place.