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Dario Amodei warns that software may soon become so cheap it feels almost free. The old model, building software for mass distribution to justify cost may no longer apply. Apps could be generated on-demand, even for simple, one-off use cases. But this flexibility comes at a cost: entire careers...

81,521 views • 8 months ago •via X (Twitter)

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In the AI era, the next great software distribution company won’t look like an app store For the last decade-plus, building a strong software business was mostly a game of scarcity. The hard part was assembling the capital, taste, engineering, and distribution to build one enduring app. The discovery systems we built matched that world: app stores, SEO, search bars, rankings, reviews, ads, marketplaces AI has blown up these constraints Soon, anyone will be able to generate software for anything: a workout injury, a work project, a personal workflow, a one-off analysis, a weird niche need only they have, maybe only in a single moment Some apps will last forever, but most won’t. Many will exist for minutes or hours, and be created even faster But just because software can be created at the speed of thought doesn’t mean everyone will become a developer. Most people won’t want to prompt, build, debug, deploy, or manage software. They’ll just want to be matched with the right tool for the job in front of them The same technological wave enabling software creation at scale is also breaking software distribution at scale. Search assumes the best answer already exists somewhere. App stores assume software is something you browse, compare, install, and keep In a world of personal software, the real question becomes: Who understands enough about me, or has earned enough trust from me, to know what software should exist for me right now? The next great app distribution companies may look less like search engines and more like trusted relationships Some will win by importing and processing personal context: your goals, constraints, calendar, body, files, workflows, history, collaborators, and intent. Others will win by exporting taste and trust: experts, creators, communities, agents, and brands that people rely on to decide what is worth using Either way, the new gateway won’t be a search box or an app store shelf. It will be the layer that recommends, assembles, routes, and personalizes software at the moment of need This is the new frontier: context, recommendation, trust, and distribution in the age of infinite software If you’re building platforms or experiences for this future, we want to meet you. Apply to speedrun. Applications for SR007 close this weekend Application link below

Josh Lu

11,421 views • 5 months ago

Evan Spiegel on the lesson that killed his first startup and led to Snapchat: "We focused on building the perfect product for way too long before we got feedback. We worked for like eighteen months to build this perfect full-featured product, which was in direct contravention to how I was always taught to build things. Build a prototype, build an MVP, get it in front of people, learn as quickly as possible. But we had spent all this time building this perfect piece of software and we hadn't thought enough about distribution. While we built this great piece of software, our competitor at the time, Naviance, had secured distribution through all the different college counselors. What piece of software are you going to choose to help your kid get into college? The one recommended by the college counselors or the one from two kids at Stanford? I think it's a pretty easy choice. So we saw very early that we had no distribution advantage. Even if we loved our software, people weren't going to use it because we didn't have a scalable way to get it in people's hands. Around that time when we saw the emergence of the App Store on iPhone, it was very clear that was a distribution channel we could really use and benefit from. But we also needed to build things we could build quickly, things we really were going to use together with our friends so we could be the first early customers. Ultimately Peekaboo and Snapchat represented that." This is exactly the asymmetry Peter Thiel describes in Zero to One: superior distribution by itself can create a monopoly, even with no product differentiation. The converse is not true. Thiel puts an even finer point on it: most businesses get zero distribution channels to work. Poor sales rather than bad product is the most common cause of failure. If you can get just one distribution channel to work, you have a great business. Estée Lauder said: it's not enough to have the most wonderful product in the world. You must be able to sell it. Many founders over-index on product perfection and under-invest in distribution. The world is full of great products nobody knows about, and mediocre products with massive distribution that dominate markets. Evan Spiegel lived it. He built the better product, watched it lose, and then built something he could actually distribute.

David Senra

27,206 views • 6 months ago

Chamath thinks AI could completely change how we value software companies. Chamath Palihapitiya believes we're reaching a point where the intellectual property behind traditional software could become practically worthless and his reasoning makes sense. Recently, a developer reportedly used AI to recreate alternatives to several of $ADBE popular products and released the software as open source. These are products that took years, billions of dollars, and thousands of engineers to develop. Now we're seeing individual developers use AI to build competing alternatives at a fraction of the cost.Of course, recreating an application doesn't necessarily mean it can match the original in quality, reliability, or features but I think the bigger implication is what happens to the software industry if AI continues improving at this pace. For decades, software companies have been able to charge premium subscription prices because building competing products was expensive, complicated, and required large engineering teams but what happens when AI agents can build similar applications in days or weeks instead of years? Suddenly, charging businesses hundreds or thousands of dollars for software becomes much harder to justify when they can potentially build customized alternatives themselves. Chamath also talks about something called headless software, which basically means AI agents can interact directly with applications without requiring humans to navigate their interfaces.Technologies like MCP make it easier for agents to connect to different software tools, access information, and complete tasks automatically. Think about $CRM. Instead of employees spending hours navigating dashboards, updating customer records, and generating reports, AI agents could eventually handle much of that work automatically. And if businesses can accomplish the same tasks with cheaper software and fewer paid licenses, that creates a HUGE problem for the traditional software subscription model. Now, I don't necessarily agree with Chamath that software IP has suddenly become worthless. companies still have proprietary data, customer relationships, security requirements, and deeply integrated systems that aren't easy to replace but I do think AI could put enormous pressure on software pricing, especially for companies selling products that can be easily replicated. But, if millions of businesses eventually start building their own applications and deploying AI agents to perform tasks that previously required humans, the amount of computing power required could increase significantly. Every AI agent still needs inference compute to operate, and that means more demand for GPUs, memory, networking equipment, data centers, and electricity. So while AI could potentially disrupt parts of the traditional software industry, it could also accelerate spending on the infrastructure powering these applications. And this is exactly why I continue to remain bullish on the broader AI infrastructure buildout over the next several years.bBullish on the AI infrastructure side of this shift. If you want to see how I’m investing around the companies powering this next wave of software and agents, check out my full Milk Road Pro portfolio below.

Milk Road AI

27,849 views • 3 days ago

Dario Amodei just told software engineers exactly how long they have. Six to twelve months. Amodei: “I have engineers within Anthropic who say I don’t write any code anymore. I just let the model write the code, I edit it, I do the things around it.” The people building the most powerful AI in history have already stopped writing code. That is not a forecast. That is the current working condition inside the lab closest to the frontier. Amodei: “We might be six to 12 months away from when the model is doing most, maybe all, of what SWEs do end-to-end.” The tech industry spent a decade making software engineers its highest-paid, most protected class. That era has a last day now. When a model can execute an entire software build end-to-end, the ability to write syntax stops being a skill. It becomes a credential for a job that no longer exists. Amodei: “And then it’s a question of how fast does that loop close.” That is the sentence everyone skipped. The code was never the hard part. The hard part was everything around it. The model just learned everything around it. Writing the code is already nearly gone. Testing is next. Deployment is next. When all three collapse into a single autonomous execution loop, the machine no longer needs a human in the chain at all. The corporation or sovereign state that closes that loop first does not gain a competitive advantage. It gains a category of speed that biological engineers cannot match, track, or reverse. That is not disruption. That is replacement at a systems level. Amodei is not describing a future disruption. He is describing the current state of his own building. The loop is already closing. The only question is whether you are inside it or outside it when it seals.

Dustin

318,750 views • 7 months ago

Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, just shortened your career timeline. His own engineers have stopped writing code. Amodei: “I have engineers within Anthropic who say I don’t write any code anymore. I just let the model write the code, I edit it, I do the things around it.” The people building the most advanced AI on Earth are already being replaced by what they built. Not in theory. Not in a forecast. Inside the building. Right now. Amodei: “I think we might be 6 to 12 months away from when the model is doing most, maybe all, of what SWEs do end-to-end.” Six to twelve months. Not from automating busywork. From replacing the full scope of what a software engineer does. Architecture. Logic. Debugging. Deployment. The entire chain. Software engineering is not some fading trade. It is the highest-paid, highest-demand, most protected skill the modern economy ever produced. And the man running a frontier lab just gave it a six-month shelf life. If the most technically sophisticated job in the economy falls first, nothing beneath it is safe. That is the inversion no one saw coming. The assumption was always that AI would eat from the bottom. Routine work. Data entry. Simple automation. It started at the top. Engineers first. Then analysts. Then strategists. Then the managers overseeing work that no longer needs them. The displacement doesn’t crawl upward. It cascades downward. Starting with the people closest to the technology itself. Amodei: “If I had to guess, I would guess that this goes faster than people imagine, and that that key element of code, and increasingly research, going faster than we imagine.” Not just code. Research. Hypotheses. Experiments. Interpretation. Discovery itself. If AI closes that loop, it doesn’t just write software. It improves itself. Every iteration compresses the timeline further. Amodei: “It’s very hard for me to see how it could take longer than a few years.” He is not selling optimism. He is setting a ceiling. A few years. Maximum. For AI to absorb the two most important intellectual functions in the economy. The window to position yourself is not a decade. It is already closing.

Dustin

16,132 views • 6 months ago