Software is becoming abundant. What you do with that abundance is the real question.
We are living through the moment when code stops being a skill and starts being a material.
For the last fifty years, software was scarce because the people who could make it were scarce. Writing code required years of training, a specific kind of patience, and a mental model of how machines think that most people never develop. That scarcity meant software was expensive. It meant most problems did not get a software solution because it was not worth the cost of building one.
That era is ending.
AI coding tools have compressed the distance between idea and implementation to almost nothing. Someone who has never written a line of code can now describe what they want and have something functional in hours. Someone with basic technical fluency can build something complex in a weekend. The cost of software is approaching zero. The supply is approaching infinite.
This is the content moment all over again.
When the internet made publishing free, content exploded. For a brief, beautiful moment, anyone could write and be read. But then the economics took over. Publishing was free, attention was scarce, and the incentive structure rewarded volume over quality. We ended up with content slop—an ocean of forgettable, interchangeable, algorithmically optimized noise designed to capture clicks rather than deliver value.
Software is about to follow the same path. When building an app costs nothing, everyone will build apps. Most of them will be bad. Many will be indistinguishable from each other. The app stores and marketplaces will fill with a thousand variations of the same tool, differentiated by nothing meaningful. Software slop.
But there is a more optimistic version of this story, and I find myself holding onto it.
Content abundance also gave us something valuable: the personal essay, the niche newsletter, the creator who serves a tiny audience precisely. When everyone can publish, most content is terrible. But some of it is extraordinary because it can be built for a specific person rather than a general audience.
Personal software is the same idea. When building is free, you do not have to compromise anymore. You do not have to build for a market of a million users when you only need a market of one. You can build the exact tool you need, with the exact features you want, for the exact context you are in. No bloat. No unnecessary compromises. No features added because another user segment asked for them.
This is the age of personal software. It is also the age of software slop. Both are true simultaneously.
The question for founders is which side of this you are building on. Are you building something generic that could be replaced by the next AI-generated alternative? Or are you building something precise—something that knows exactly who it is for and delivers value that is genuinely hard to replicate?
The moat in software used to be engineering. It was hard to build, so if you built it, you had an advantage.
That moat is gone. What remains is taste. Judgment. The ability to identify a real problem, understand it deeply, and build something that fits so precisely that no generic alternative can replace it.
Everyone can code now. That means almost nothing you build will be defensible because it was built. The defense has to come from somewhere else entirely.