Fast Software: Fast Fashion or Something Else?
Three possible futures for software. All of them arriving at once.
In 2011, I was working at a startup. At some point, I was tasked with implementing email support.
The feature was supposed to generate a unique email address for each customer, and let them email it to automatically kick off some work. That’s a simple enough description on paper, but those of you familiar with the chaotic inner workings of email will recognize the complexity: setting up inbound routing, parsing message bodies (with attachments), handling authentication, wiring up the business logic. All said, it took me about six weeks to fully build it.
Fast forward to 2026, at my current job, another startup. Because email is eternal, we had a similar feature requirement for inbound email handling. This time though, it took me just four days to launch. For one, I already had a rough outline in my head of what needed to be built (even though 15 years is an awfully long time). But what really moved the needle was that AI handled the parts that used to take the longest.
The popular narrative right now is that AI turns everyone into a developer. And, yes, probably? That’s a very important part of the story, but it’s certainly not the only part. Right now, experienced developers are benefiting from an unprecedented speed multiplier. That’s a different story than “everyone can code now,” and it has different implications.
Speed Has Happened Before
Speed increases aren’t new. Other industries have already lived through the consequences of overnight explosions in production speed and/or reductions to barriers to entry. Each one ended up somewhere slightly different.
Fast fashion produced landfills. Production got cheaper and faster, allowing the turnaround time for new, on-trend clothing to shrink from seasons to weeks. But all that speed didn’t lead to more original design. Our landfills today aren’t full of bold creative risks. They’re full of low-quality imitations of recent trends - clothing slop, if you will.
The software version of this shows hints of arriving already. This future is a gloomy one: repos of abandonware and AI-written clones chasing the software flavor of the month. Someone launches a popular tool, and within days there are dozens of near-identical copies, built fast but maintained by nobody.
Self-publishing produced a discovery problem. Writers who couldn’t get a publisher’s attention could suddenly reach readers directly, which was genuinely transformative for a lot of careers that would have never existed otherwise. But when everyone publishes, nobody gets found. The market flooded, the signal-to-noise ratio cratered, and the bottleneck moved from the ability to produce to the ability to get attention.
Spoiler: software is heading here too. Software from everywhere, wildly varying in quality, aimed at every conceivable niche. Production isn’t the meaningful bottleneck anymore. Instead it’s very conceivable that soon, discovery and trust, even more so than already, will become the biggest bottlenecks.
Digital photography produced a skills gap. Film forced deliberation. You only had 36 exposures, each one costing a non-trivial amount of actual money to develop. When that constraint vanished, the photographers who already understood things like composition and lighting became more prolific. They could experiment, iterate, and shoot without worrying about wasted film. Meanwhile, the removal of the barrier to entry encouraged lots of people to generate noise. The ceiling went up for skilled practitioners, even as the floor dropped out for everyone else.
The same dynamic is playing out in software. Shipping friction is approaching zero. While, yes, more people are creating more software slop, one skilled developer can now ship what used to require a team of five and a multi-sprint roadmap. Capable engineers can get more things built, with good quality, for more specific problems.
Agentic coding is doing all three of these things to software simultaneously. It enables imitation at zero cost, it’s eliminating the gatekeepers between idea and deployment, but at the same time it’s also removing the ceiling on what capable developers are capable of achieving.
What Stays Under Your Control
To me, this is actually the encouraging part. While it’s interesting to think about branching futures for all of software, the reality is there’s no single person sitting in a boardroom making industry-wide decisions here.
It’s just individuals like you and me, along with their AI agents - reacting to incentives and building things one repo at a time. Next time you watch Claude Code reticulating, ask yourself: what problem is this solving? And more importantly, does it actually matter?
Optimize for building things that are valuable, and that truly move the needle. When building is quick and cheap, the hard part isn’t building anymore, it’s knowing when not to build. The only software that holds up is software built with taste and intent: everything else is noise.
The future is arriving, whether we like it or not. The ground is shifting under our feet, and speed is no longer the differentiator it once was. But the principles that separate great software from the rest aren’t going anywhere.
Always enjoy your blogs. You are a storyteller.