Software is about to eat the world much faster. By Marc Andreessen.

Fifteen years ago, I wrote that software is eating the world
– at the time, a controversial claim. The main prediction of the essay has come true.

As a simple measure, technology’s share of the market capitalization among the ten largest businesses in the world has gone from 31.5% to 94.4% over that period. Amazingly, this happened even though only 1 in 300 people on earth wrote software, and every line of it had to be written by hand.

Software has been eating the world at the speed of human hands. It is about to eat the world at the speed of compute. … Today, if you talk to any software engineer at a leading company, they’ll tell you that agents write almost all of their code. …

When agents write 90% of the code, engineers can literally do ten times as much. The 10x engineer becomes the 100x engineer, as they shift from writing artisanal code to operating as the CTO [Chief Technical Officer] of a fleet of agents. The 1000x engineer isn’t too far behind. As Scott [Wu] puts it: “Within our lifetime, engineers will go from bricklayers to architects, focusing on the creativity of designing systems rather than the manual labor of putting them together.” …

Every time programmers get more leverage, doomers predict the end of software engineering. Compilers were supposed to shrink the profession. So was open source. So was the cloud. Instead, each leap made software cheaper to build, and demand for software, and engineers, exploded. It keeps happening because, as Milton Friedman observed, human wants and needs are infinite, so economic demand is infinite, and job growth can continue forever (see The Techno-Optimist Manifesto). Technology is how we unlock that demand. Technology gives us leverage, lowers the cost to produce, and makes previously uneconomical use cases economical.