Articles

Insights and perspectives

How we think about systems, and what that means for the companies we build them for.

Platforms will eat the worldSoftware ate the world by turning every industry into a software industry. The next shift is not AI writing that code faster — it is business systems ceasing to be code at all.

The bottleneck theory of approaching a software singularityWriting code was the bottleneck for decades, and it is disappearing. What matters now is which bottleneck comes next, and whether removing bottlenecks can itself be automated.

All of us who understand AI have a responsibilityThe future of AI is not better prompts or bigger models. It is intelligent platforms that guarantee outcomes, hide complexity, and make expertise available to everyone.

Nine databases on 2 GB, and the one with no server won.One working system, one dataset, one code path, nine storage engines and a proxy. Each got a 2 GB machine with the application resident on it. SQLite took six of the eight read scenarios and tied PostgreSQL for the run. Two engines could not finish it.

AI didn't replace developers. It replaced the easy part.Code was never the hard part. It was the visible part. Generating it is becoming almost free, and every line of it is still someone's responsibility.

Systems that fail to become platforms will dieSaaS was the right answer while software was expensive to produce. AI removes that constraint — and with it the reason the fixed application should stay the unit of software.

The third software option nobody offered youFor decades software meant choosing between renting a product you never own and owning one that slowly decays. There is a third model: you own the system, and the platform underneath it keeps evolving.

Beyond Jevons ParadoxCheaper AI means more AI. That is the first-order effect. The second is that execution costs shape which ideas we let ourselves consider at all — and those costs just moved.

When everything can be built, the real question is what is worth buildingSoftware has stopped being the limiting factor. What slows an organization down now is not building, but deciding what is worth building.