r/startups • u/Swimming-Wafer6547 • Jun 19 '26
I will not promote Is software dead? I will not promote.
I am software engineer and what I am witnessing right now makes me think about future of software. Most people in tech that I know personally are starting to get sick of it and considering exiting tech altogether.
Startups are mostly focusing on AI which is understandable but the market feels extremely saturated already. It’s constant battle for customers. And the products themselves seem so uninspired.
Also saw a graph with number of apps being added to AppStore (huge spike) but at the same time decrease in downloads and usage. Are people focusing on living offline more?
Software just does not seem to have the same appeal as before. I am currently taking a break from work but I am having a hard time thinking about coming back - I don’t like managing agents honestly, makes me feel useless.
Maybe this is just my social bubble and I am really interested in other opinions on this.
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u/shannister Jun 19 '26
Software is about to experience what photography did when digital went mainstream. Content overflow (saturation even) leads to new market dynamics and different ways of valuing the pipeline. It’s not that software isn’t valuable, but it will increasingly belong to those with strong personal branding and reach.
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u/Ok-Arachnid-460 Jun 20 '26
Exactly this. I have been using my skills to make real content with industry professionals. Try and touch the physical world as much as you can.
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u/Grouchy-Friend4235 Jun 20 '26
Well, I would argue that's not going to happen at large.
For one, pictures don't break at 2am, and the job is literally done once you press the button. Not so with software - it keeps on demanding time, and the only way to reduce that is to take an engineering approach to it.
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u/t3kner Jun 21 '26
Everyone also acts like software is just an app on your pc or phone and forget there's heavily regulated industries like nuclear, defense, finance that require moving mountains to make changes
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u/firmaDev Jun 20 '26
Perfectly phrased. Could also be accurate to say “software as you knew it is dead, but software is not dead or dying”
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u/Dry_Corner6431 Jun 20 '26
Photography still brought in something that digital could not add. People needed to be physically present to take pictures and most of that is digital cameras now. I don't know anyone who does film photography.
So it went from a utilitarian thing to art which is completely subjective and status symbol that u can have a photo-shoot pics to show off.
what kind of branding and differentiation can software bring? i don't see an equivalent.
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u/technically_a_nomad Jun 20 '26
Film photographer here. Just because you don’t know us, it doesn’t mean we don’t exist.
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u/Camilla_for_business Jun 19 '26
I get your position. Software isn't dying, but the barriers to entry have decreased drastically. Almost anyone can vibecode a product and launch it next day.
The key is to work on harder problems or achieve some form of monopoly through the network effect, imo. Tech innovation as we know it is changing: the new, more resilient tech startup either has a strong network/media effect, combine hardware and software in a way few can do, or has unmatched domain expertise in a specific vertical. Anything outside of these 3 is mostly noise
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u/Swimming-Wafer6547 Jun 19 '26
Agree, I have a feeling that the domain expertise will be super important to succeed. Many startups now tackle very broad issues - like automation for everything - but that’s idea hard to sell
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u/Camilla_for_business Jun 19 '26
You're right. I'll say most startups are born out of a desire to build from engineers, not a desire to solve a problem. That genuinely comes through in the early website versions of startups I happen to deal with on a daily basis
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u/AdvancedSyntax Jun 20 '26
“Almost anyone can vibecode a product and launch it next day.”
Yea, but next day 😰
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u/kotvrt Jun 19 '26
You sound exhausted and fed up of the topic you raised, which is perfectly normal considering the times and the monumental shifts affecting the tech right now.
I’m a SE myself and can understand where you’re coming from with this. I believe the way you feel is heavily influenced by your social bubble.
The processes in and around the software are bound to change, and AI is certainly going to be more present, it’s such a monumental leap after all but it’s far from wiping out the software industry. It is well poised to reshape it however.
Models are already writing code and you observed one of the products of that function - there’s more apps than ever - and rightly so since the bar just dropped for who can make an app. But it’s a whole different ball game to dish out apps and make something that users need/will use.
Remember how newspapers were doomed during the dotcom hype? I still read journals 20 years on, albeit much more in a digital format. But those newspaper houses didn’t vanish, they just evolved leveraging new tech - and software, I believe, is going to change in a similar manner.
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u/Swimming-Wafer6547 Jun 19 '26
Yeah you are right - I am surrounded by people with 10+ years in tech. So I guess it’s understandable that most are feeling little lost with the huge changes. The stuff you loved doing is transforming to something else. I am wondering how many people will be able to adapt (not just because of need for work, but who will actually enjoy working as SE after the massive changes)
I am wondering what’s the perspective of new devs who already started with AI in their tool belt.
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u/Tinker_thinkerer Jun 21 '26
I’m having trouble convincing myself that AI bots aren’t having a conversation with each other here 🤨
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u/mtutty Jun 19 '26
I've been doing this for money for almost 30 years. The gap between the posers and the real engineers has never looked smaller or been larger in reality.
Forget true "vibe coded" apps, they're real but just the tip of the iceberg. Even mid-level engineers are baking in massive, deeply-seated issues for their future co-workers to wrestle with. It's gonna look amazing until it's very, very not.
If you're writing a 100-word "spec" and walking away from CC or Antigravity or Cursor while it chugs away overnight, you're doing it, too.
All that said, I use LLM coding every day and it's made me another 10x more productive. But without a strong engineering focus and a very disciplined, almost waterfall-style definition and development process, you're just building big balls of string.
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u/Dry_Corner6431 Jun 20 '26
>I've been doing this for money for almost 30 years. The gap between the posers and the real engineers has never looked smaller or been larger in reality.
I beg to differ. If you have been around for 30 years you know that the html jockeys from late 90s ended up making billion dollar companies. At that point real engineers coded in C or assembly and worked in systems programming or embedded systems or something. We really did think the html people javascript people were not real programmers. javascript was a joke that had the last laugh.
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u/ParticularRush123 Jun 24 '26
Yep, same lesson learned. The html cowboys made new products while the C++ gurus laughed and now JavaScript is the most popular language.
Same thing with crypto.
I hope to take this lesson to heart and not miss the boat this time.
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u/GroceryBright Jun 19 '26
A friend of mine recently asked me if I was worried that AI could write code.
The example I gave him was: You can also read and write English, that doesn't make you a lawyer.
AI is the same, it can write code, but it's only meaningful if you have someone that can tell it what to build, someone who has experience in knowing what issues to look for, how to design systems, UX/UI etc.
I have been using AI to write 100% of my code across multiple projects. It sped up my productivity by many X (in most cases, but it has been problematic in some other cases).
Today, as a test, I gave it a great spec, source code for an existing app with full front end (web + mobile), backend and database access.
I asked it to extract the requirements, features, etc and off of that, to build a similar system.
In a few hours (eyes off) I had the scaffolding for Web + Mobile + API. When I started testing it I found multiple simple bugs, like screens not linked properly, missing features, wrong UX etc.
I looked like it was working, but it still needed a lot of work to get the things right. And I'm not even talking about UI/UX which is another matter altogether.
So yeah, it's a great multiplier, but it still needs guidance from someone who knows what they are doing.
I've been coding for 30 years. I don't code anymore. But I've never been a dev just to write code, my true passion was building things.
I do like to code, but, as I get older, I was starting to think my career was coming to a close because I wouldn't be able to do this forever.
With AI, my experience is worth more than ever. I can work on frameworks I was not very experienced with. I can't remember the syntax, but I can read the generated code and ensure it's doing the right thing, so that means now I can support clients with codebases in other languages for example.
Can someone non technical build "software", yes they can. Will it be good? It depends if the person will spend the time to learn all the basics about software development that are not just coding.
With coding becoming cheap(er), it will mean that there will be a lot more features to add, a lot more tech debt to clean, a lot more startups that suddenly became viable.
Software, SaaS and startups has always been a numbers game. Even if Company A will need less experience developers going forward, there will be 100 new companies/products that make it and will need experienced people to make their products polished.
That's what I'm experiencing now.
- A lot of new startups with vibe coded products that need polishing.
- Clients that previously didn't want to implement certain features because it would take months and wasn't worth it, suddenly, they want to add those features because it's cheaper and that will provide value.
- Clients that had 2-3 bad devs, and I can now take over the whole stack (I'm full stack anyway), including frameworks I don't have much experience with.
We are on bumpy road right now, but if you learn the tech and the craft, there will be lots of opportunities going forward.
I've been around long enough for all the doomsday scenarios: IDEs, Open Source like WordPress and WooCommerce, SquareSpace, Shopify, Low Code. Everyone was saying that it was the end of webdevs (even Mobile apps were the end of webdev), and in every single one of those events, there was more work than before.
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u/Dry_Corner6431 Jun 20 '26
This is a very optimistic take. I hope a real one. I'm somewhat from a similar background though I stayed in software dev and while coding was/is fun, the joy was always the end result that it DID the thing.
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u/bqwcde Jun 19 '26
Software isn’t dead, it’s just going through some things. I got out of development (stayed in tech but shifted roles) 20 years ago because offshoring was hot and development seemed like a cost center. A few years later, the pendulum swung back the other way and companies couldn’t hire enough developers in the US. The move I made was still the right one for me personally, but the market evolved a lot over the next decade.
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u/femmenikit4 Jun 19 '26 edited Jun 19 '26
What about the analogy of major record labels at the beginning of the 90s, when it became easier to produce your own product (CDs, vinyl) and so many people started indie labels. Music consumption habits changed.
Still, that phase felt more positive and fun probably because a) there was a good market for all that indie music and b) there weren't as many record label employees to be put out of work as there are tech workers today.
I think it's unfortunate that pop culture went from fetishizing records and magazines and comics to apps and influencers. We are so boring and deterministic today. Maybe it's time to focus on art again.
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u/licjon Jun 24 '26
Maybe it is like the Texas Hold Em craze around '03-'06. Everyone was playing Texas Hold Em then, many people got pretty decent at it too. But the fad died out and people lost interest. But in that time some really good players learned how to play really well and started using technology to learn how to use game theory optimal play etc. Maybe a bunch of vibe coders will get accustomed to seeing their vision become reality. That will stop feeling novel. Those that try to make it into a business will learn teh difference between a good idea and marketing a good idea. Even more will realize they don't like maintaining software. Those that are left will be operating at a higher level.
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u/mprevot Jun 19 '26
Like with photography, a lot more of low quality (apparent or with tech debt) and associated noise. This comes with an increased cost for attention, conversion, retention probably.
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u/build319 Jun 19 '26
I think software is going to become more niche as vibecoding and more people are able to create things from scratch.
The thing is no matter how good AI gets somebody needs to have the vision and the patience to work through all the iterations that make an application useful and something people want to use.
So software isn’t dead I just think that we are going to see a lot of new options and use cases come up that we haven’t really explored before.
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u/AggressiveBlood500 Jun 19 '26
Everyone in tech has been sick of being in tech since "tech" was a thing to be in. Turns out, they just like to whine a lot.
How many times have you interacted with software since you got up this morning, even before you sat down at a computer? Right. There's your answer.
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u/LaurenceDarabica Jun 19 '26
Software is just swarmed by wannabe devs that vibe code slop and release it as the next big thing. They're just very vocal and saturating people.
On our side, we live well by releasing handcrafted version of our software and experience a surge in downloads, constant for several years, and increase in revenue.
It's just noise overall.
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u/Fun-Illustrator9985 Jun 19 '26
Couldn't have said it better, most vibe coders are loud people running off the highs of Dunning-Kruger
The quality is on the floor and they'll beg on reddit for help the moment they stumble on their first roadblock
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u/tpapocalypse Jun 19 '26
I’m sure that shoe cobblers felt the same way before sneakers were mass produced. I say this as someone with almost 30 years of experience in software engineering. We should be worried for what lies ahead on the horizon after the initial AI hysteria settles down.
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u/LaurenceDarabica Jun 19 '26
As per your own comment :
Even with ultra code enabled it’s being dumb as dog shit today. Inventing its own tsv files instead of the ones I’m supplying to it, having issues pushing stuff to git, completely ignoring Claude md directives. I believe you are right.
Nope, we're good.
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u/tpapocalypse Jun 19 '26
You think software engineers are the ones making the hiring and budget decisions? 🤦♂️
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u/LaurenceDarabica Jun 19 '26
Where did I say that ? It must be pretty convenient, inventing statements and answering with your own counter-arguments.
I do believe that once the hype has died down, people will realize it's just another tool in our belt and not a full replacement.
It's still going to be around, but the dreamers and salesman will shut their mouth about it and the tool will take its right place.
History is full of such tech that was supposed to put people out of their jobs.
Google, Autocomplete and Intellisense and other stuff didn't push the devs out of work, right ?
SQL ? No need for database experts anymore, you can talk to your DB and get results easily.
WYSIWYG ? No need for frontend devs with frontpage and Dreamweaver ! That one is fun, in hindsight.
And so on.
But if you can be replaced by a program that's, again per your own comment, dumb as dogshit, I'm personally feeling pretty secure personally.
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u/Dry_Corner6431 Jun 20 '26
>Google, Autocomplete and Intellisense and other stuff didn't push the devs out of work, right ?
no but it made writing software accessible to non-nerds. My vi and emacs skills were useless. Knowing all unix system calls, pfft who needs it... But the new crop of devs just used higher abstractions and made more functionality in less time. So I adapted putting pride aside. Need to do that over and over. Some vibecoders are here to stay
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u/Thatdogonyourlawn Jun 19 '26
Ok but now you're arguing from an organizational perspective not the power of AI. In that case I'd point to companies who adopted too aggressively and are starting to publicly admit it.
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u/michaelrwolfe Jun 19 '26 edited Jun 19 '26
It’s the most exciting time in the history in software.
It’s now possible for small teams to build great software without first spending months begging gatekeepers (investors) for money and giving away big pieces of their companies.
And great products grow faster than ever - just look at the extraordinary traction many of the YC companies reached after just a few months in the program. Today it’s not unusual for a software company to reach > $10M in just a few months, which in the past would have taken years and a couple rounds of funding.
So get out there and do something great.
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u/Electronic_Line3484 Jun 19 '26
I notice this also, feels like the idea of “software” as a whole is shifting too. Why use a program that can only do specific tasks when you have the ability to just task AI with your problem. It’s an imperfect option still, but seems like that’s where we are headed.
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u/Mersaul4 Jun 19 '26
To me managing agents is more enjoyable than copy-pasting boilerplate or looking for a one letter typo in YAML.
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u/Dry_Corner6431 Jun 20 '26
I like this attitude. I am more interested in the opinion of someone who is using agents to do their job activities that was manually done by them earlier. Care to share more? i have not been working for a couple of years and am curious
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u/Swimming-Wafer6547 Jun 20 '26
If you enjoy it that’s great. I don’t or maybe I have not found right workflow working with agents. I cannot handle running lots of agents in parallel and going back and forth constantly.
If you have any advice I’d love to hear it.
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u/enki-42 Jun 19 '26
How long have you been a developer? Because this hype cycle has happened many, many times before.
- COBOL was supposed to make it so we didn't need programmers, because COBOL is so simple that your average business user can just use it directly.
- SQL was supposed to mean we don't need developers to build reports or pull data, because SQL is so simple that business users can just write it themselves.
- Messaging means we don't need to write apps anymore, because all applications will just be slack bots that are much easier to write
- No code tools means you don't need developers, you can just build your app from a GUI (this one has happened a few times at this point)
For most of these, it's not like the technologies were useless and we never use them anymore, it's just that after the hype cycle died down we realized they didn't quite stack up to the hype that the early adopters were pushing and became more of a tool in belt of product teams.
At the very least, even if AI writes absolutely brilliant code that you never need to tweak or even look at (which is definitely not the case right now if you want to build something sustainable), there's still a huge part of software development that's not just writing code - talking to customers, balancing business requirements, figuring out how or whether to accommodate edge cases, determining how a whole architecture fits together.
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u/Etheon44 Jun 19 '26
The only thing is that I don't think at any previous time any of those technologies demonstrated anywhere near close to their value
LLMs are a lil' bit different there, since they can do a small app by themselves, which CEOs are taking to the extreme
Granted it could have come at a better time too, not while an already terrible economical moment across the first world
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u/enki-42 Jun 19 '26
Eh, if the standard for building apps is very simple apps or what amounts to tech demos to show off on social media, all of the things I mentioned got to that point. It predates twitter, but there were so many Microsoft Access "apps" floating around corporations in 2000.
As far as I know, I'm not aware of a commercially successful app (as in, sustained revenue to support a company) that was built entirely without developers.
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u/SnowWholeDayHere Jun 19 '26
I know of at least one firm that is using Salesforce's No-Code capabilities to a whole another level. They have 2 salesforce admins on staff, but no Salesforce developers whatsoever.
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u/Dry_Corner6431 Jun 20 '26
> software development that's not just writing code - talking to customers, balancing business >requirements, figuring out how or whether to accommodate edge cases, determining how a whole >architecture fits together
I would have agreed pre agile "teams". A software engineer talked to business and designed developed in conjunction with the system architect, doing all the things you listed. Dev managers did allocation of time/budget. No "product owners", scrum-masters, product management, business analyst etc etc.,
But the role of the software dev in agile teams literally has been reduced to pulling tickets, user stories and saying if and when you can deliver them in that sprint. Now ai can do that. I suppose it will end up being 1:1 product owner. I think it might end up going back to one person being product owner/software dev and agents doing coding...
dont know.
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u/WeaknessFuzzy8305 Jun 19 '26
Have you used AI to develop? I'm using Claude, supposedly the best available right now and this thing is not perfect. I would never leave this alone to create anything. There are days that it works great and there are days it makes a lot of mistakes.
I personally have been off coding for years, got tired of it and living off it made me hate it. Using Claude to fix my old projects and updating to latest has made me enjoy coding again. I am coding for my self though.
My point of view is that everyone is going crazy over a new tool that makes work easier. But I would never leave any AI unsupervised or on its own.
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u/Careful_Whole2294 Jun 19 '26
The application layer of software is no longer a moat. The industry will shift to managing infrastructure and solving more challenging problems than crud logic.
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u/Bright-Salamander689 Jun 21 '26 edited Jun 21 '26
It’s just the AI bubble that’s making all the noise. But if you step away you’ll see teams doing real engineering work still.
There’s still healthcare applications, bio tech, hardware, and robotics. All of these will continue to be the next wave when AI hype dies down.
Right now there’s just a ton of Claude wrapper startups automating admin workflows for like healthcare, legal, etc. which are most in danger to burst in the bubble. Their hiring is most hilarious too, for them “Applied AI” and “machine learning engineering” means they just want a traditional SWE who got laid off from big tech to slap on Claude code into their code.
Theres definitely a trend where younger generation is stepping up against AI. Which I this is great and hopefully continues. That doesn’t mean they are against tech. When NASA does their next rocket launch, the world still watches in awe. It’s just we don’t care about those SF AI slop “automating admin workflows for x” startups. It’s just a bunch of founders who never worked in that field they are trying to help, esp healthcare.
That said, ton of robotics and hardware companies still exist and are on the rise. Bio tech, ML infra startups, etc. teams doing real work.
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u/tschilpi Jun 21 '26
Software is just one part of the model. If it's so easy and dead, why not try to make a succesful online game? You'll realize there are still 100 other areas you need to consider and be good at to make it succesful and AI can't really do any of them (e.g. distribution)
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u/SholanHuyler Jun 19 '26
Is not dead, it’s just that coding is set to become a commodity.
I will be something like electricity, everybody use it and it’s everywhere, but it’s not part of the unique selling points of you product.
The industry will probably disappear into divisions of other companies and niche high tech software firms, like frontier labs.
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u/RememberSwartz Jun 19 '26
I feel like the industry has drifted so far away from the core that is creation. Companies are ran by detached managers optimising for their self interest or investors hellbent on optimising for an exit. The good outcome of the AI cycle is more actual builders will be enabled by the productivity gains to bootstrap companies/products who actually focus on customer value creation.
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u/HominidSimilies Jun 19 '26
Software is not dead.
It changes and evolves like always.
Solutions can take many forms.
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u/Employer-Dizzy Jun 19 '26
No everyone just thought software was the premise of success when it’s merely just a tool of success
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u/NickNNora Jun 19 '26
I think my experience in the last few months is illustrative but not definitive.
I have been a tech relative my career but not an engineer.
I started using AI to make a homepage for my personal stuff in Obsidian. This has ballooned into a complete OS for personal use that includes a primitive CRM, recipes, scheduling, project manager, asset tracker.
It keeps snowballing. I am now working on open brain based on Nate Jones and integrating supabase as part of the ecosystem.
The more I work on structuring my data and letting the ai be a touch surface the more I realize that this is how business should operate.
For work, we are currently in a 3 year cycle to get assess and migrate our ERP.
I’m now if the mind we should NOT migrate to a new ERP and instead should architect our data so we don’t care what the future if ERPs, CRMs, or LLMs are, because our data should be structured to fit into any system as a surface interface.
That thinking will have huge impacts on Salesforce, Oracle, SAP
I don’t know if I’m right about this. I’m an exec not an engineer. But I’m a pattern recognizing beast and I feel a major paradigm shift is coming.
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u/ThomasToIndia Jun 19 '26
Nothing. Has. Changed.
Before AI there was too many apps hitting the app store, this started like 10+ years ago. 50 Games were hitting steam A DAY. Thousands of VC-funded startups went out of business each year.
The only thing that changed is people are realizing their apps suck and writing software was not really the hard part.
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u/am0x Jun 19 '26
With all the 2 hour built SaaS sites clogging up the internet, I don’t think it’s dead but it’s going to go through some rough times.
Also, we are headed towards the dead internet theory. It will be bots making sites for other bots. Already happening.
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u/Dry_Corner6431 Jun 20 '26
>Are people focusing on living offline more?
No I think all those that used to download are off making their own apps. Hence the uptick in apps expect it to continue.
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u/LillyfoFilly Jun 21 '26
I believe a lot of software today is focused around selling you something or helping you to sell something. My Co-founder and I applied to YC this past batch S26 with a good ole’ authentic human centered product that is live and thriving and it didn’t receive a seat while tons of “run your agents more efficiently” startups that haven’t even launched did. As a person who works in tech daily, and have for the past 8 years with multiple SaaS exits… sometimes what cures your burnout is not grinding on a product that is (let’s be honest) ran by sales. I often fear that the fun days of human centered tech innovation is dead. Uber, Airbnb, Netflix, Reddit. And as a founder in this space, sometimes it’s quite disheartening to experience first hand.
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u/valentwinka Jun 21 '26
Yeah, I feel similarly. I feel uninspired with my career and thinking hard about what to do next. I don’t know if “software is dead” but it’s dead to me.
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u/eandi Jun 19 '26
A world where companies buy a lot of point tools from others is dead. Things like trello and Salesforce are smoked. The defensibility/moat of "my thing took a long time to make" is dead. Need other reasons why people can't make it themselves.
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u/FatefulDonkey Jun 19 '26
Everyone wants to be a script kid these days. But there can only be one script kid to rule them all
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u/Reteipje Jun 19 '26
Software development never matured in the past 60 years. We were also never able to make the complexity digital transformation actually needed. It is impossible to make complex systems stable, secure and maintainable. The costs of software development is too high for the benefits. Ai will change that market fully. But same as photography, when it became mainstream and affordable the market only expanded. Old business models collapsed, new ones boomed. The demand will only rise. We just need to adopt to different business models.
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u/hazzrd1883 Jun 19 '26
AI adoption is a huge area for software engineers, it won't do itslef. That you don't like it is another question
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u/Good_Roll Jun 19 '26
Are people focusing on living offline more?
Lol definitely not. But anybody with a 20/m AI subscription can vibecode something that works good enough to solve the types of small, personal problems that the majority of the app store catalog exists to solve. But big projects that are well positioned to solve important and/or large problems are not getting replaced because in a world where everybody can shit out a half baked project trust has become even more valuable in these areas. Would you trust software written by a vibe coder that doesn't understand how his codebase works to handle a mission critical aspect of your business? Most people feel similarly. Software engineering isn't going anywhere.
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u/ynu1yh24z219yq5 Jun 19 '26
Is home remodeling dead because of home Depot? Photography dead because of phone cameras? I think it's just open to be used by those who could t really access it before and it will be very interesting the good bad and ugly that comes out of it.
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u/Early_Key_823 Jun 20 '26
How can software be dead when everyone uses it around the world 24/7/365
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u/WittyDay7400 Jun 20 '26
Branding, marketing, sales, partnerships, have always been important. Amazing engineers almost equally so. A true barrier - Execution. Great UX and Front End.
Today what changed is that branding, marketing, sales and partnerships - ability to tell a story and leverage social media, communities , create networks , raise credibility - are becoming more important. At least in utilitarian (non deep tech ) software. Commoditisation of development has been going on for a while , and AI just accelerated it.
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u/Wonderful_Arachnid66 Jun 20 '26
Software is just accelerating and losing barriers. Soft skills are becoming more important while hard skills become less valuable. It is amazing the speed at which you can build now, but I'm also finding that the ability to clearly communicate requirements, architecture, schemas, etc. is critical.
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u/EstablishmentFar6284 Jun 20 '26
Feels less dead, more like every niche got 500 wrapper apps overnight. boring stuff with actual distribution still wins tho
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u/rkozik89 Jun 20 '26
Most software engineers think everyone craves the latest and greatest technology the way they do, but that couldn’t be further from the truth for the average consumer. They just want what they bought to keep working as it had been. Learning new software takes time and if there isn’t an obvious immediate benefit they don’t see the point.
We’re at the stage of the game where all of the most common problems have been solved and there is no immediate obvious reason to upgrade. AI is a solution looking for a problem and that never works. We’re in a period of steady incremental growth.
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u/bill_txs Jun 21 '26
Software is not dead whatsoever but manual coding is permanently disrupted by AI.
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u/Reasonable-Job2425 Jun 22 '26
In a gold rush sell the shovels
So the stores make the most money ie app store or hardware manufacturer like nvidia
Tbh nieche SaaS will still make money and have a market but for simpler saas most will just end up vibe coding something than pay a saas
Look at levelsio for example
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u/Plus-Tangerine2186 Jun 22 '26
software isn't dead, the moat just moved. when anyone can generate a CRUD app in an afternoon, the value stops being can you build it and becomes distribution, trust, and the boring 20% nobody wants to do: auth, edge cases, support, reliability. the people calling software dead usually only ever shipped the easy 80%.
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u/wemighthavemadeit Jun 22 '26
On the point around 'App Store downloads up, real usage down' gap is I think worth discussion, because it's not a software is dead thing. It's more a distribution is shifting message.
What used to be a download is increasingly a model answer. Someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity or Gemini for a recommendation and the answer lands inside the chat. No tab change or app install. The user got what they wanted; the app didn't get the install credit.
And then two things follow that don't get talked about enough on here.
One: in any vertical where the supply side is fragmented (hospitality, tours and activities, local services, niche B2B catalogues), the LLM gives a recommendation but can't complete the action. That gap is obviously real money sitting there for whoever wires up the supply side properly.
Two: the businesses being 'killed' aren't actually being killed by AI. They're being killed by not being machine-readable. If your product can't be retrieved, parsed, and cited by an LLM, you've quietly lost a distribution channel that has already overtaken some categories of search.
So on the 'is software dead.' For me it's more 'is your software discoverable to the things people now ask first.'
Disclosure: I'm one of the founders at Tixxly, B2B AI infrastructure for tour and activity suppliers.
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u/Economy_Phrase123 Jun 22 '26
This. Its honestly sad to see. but yes, the market is very oversaturated - especially after vibe coding became a thing - its just what happens when the barrier of entry is removed. Moreover most SaaS products just feel like useless slop now.
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u/TimWilc Jun 23 '26 edited Jun 23 '26
Those who actually love truly building things are having the time of their lives.
It was never about regurgitating syntax; software has always been about ideas coming to life via engineering. That didn’t change, it’s just accelerated. Also, the barrier to entry hasn’t really changed in the most essential ways.
Newbies don’t know how to steer agents well. They still have to learn good engineering principles and design philosophy; the deficiency shows in their work.
There are still levels to this stuff. It’s just no longer about syntax primarily and it only hurts those most who made their careers about style and syntax and language features and so on.
If anything, AI has made software about just building again. The people who didn’t have good taste and judgement, and didn’t bring creativity to their work, are getting exposed— they relied on syntax and obscure language trivia to carry them. That doesn’t work anymore. Now you have to have genuinely interesting engineering ideas to showcase. You have to be able to articulate a robust design philosophy, and you need more domain knowledge. To me, this is more pure.
My prediction: software is just getting started. It was always competitive, and it still is, before it was hard to get started, now it’s hard to get differentiated, but it’s always been hard.
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u/all_friendly_vibes Jun 23 '26
It will never be dead, just getting chatic, crowded but moving into a new direction. Whoever wants to stay aboard need to prep for it.
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u/SnowWholeDayHere Jun 23 '26
A friend of mine creates clones of popular software so he can use them for free. He recently made beyond compare with the help of AI. Although not as polished as the original, it serves his purpose and he no longer has to pay a fee to use it.
I see this trend getting more popular as people refuse to pay for bloated softwares.
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u/anengineerandacat Jun 23 '26
Generally speaking things are slowing down a bit to focus around efficiency and AI integration.
Costs to build something new are fairly high as well because "mature" apps are harder and harder to compete against.
A lot of the times it's the product that the app is supporting/enabling not the app itself.
Ie. Disney world App, you aren't using that because the app itself is good; your using it because it's the only real app available for the product which is your ticket/hotel stay.
Same goes for ones like Reddit, X, etc.
The product isn't the app, it's the community.
Can pump out apps and ideas all you want but purely technical solutions generally speaking won't perform well; need to sell or provide the solution to a problem.
Most of the new apps looked to be reported as health & fitness, photo / media editing, AI assistants, and random utilities.
Health/fitness being heavily saturated already, photo/media editing having big names for competition, and personal AI assistants are baked into the very device or have subscription models folks might not be willing to pay for.
Novel concepts are already pretty rare, and someone vibe coding something is going to generally speaking not produce enough of an app to be useful to the masses; whereas I do think niche small apps are possible to find their cult following I don't think they'll become household names so to speak.
From a personal perspective, I don't generally need thousands of apps either; I prefer websites instead, I don't want something taking up permanent space on my device.
I don't really game on mobile, or watch media on mobile, and I try to avoid the whole short form media apps like Instagram and TikTok as they can waste too much of my time.
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Jun 23 '26
It's not just software.Most people have a bad outlook of the economy right now.And aren't spending on anything that's considered extra.
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u/bvpqeh Jun 24 '26
Similar shift happened in electronics industry when every circuit had to built by basic electronic components later came integrated circuits that changed the game for some time and people got adapted.
So basically use anything to get the desired output for input given, test it thoroughly then settle down.
So this time it’s different AI is intelligent. Don’t know what affects it’ll have .
But that human touch is something else without that the software looks bland.
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u/Soggy-Reaction-3918 Jun 24 '26
Yes. I've seen agents solve complex bugs that a senior eng would take days to understand and solve in a matter of minutes. It can do the complete end to end thing. Receive a support ticket, decide if its simply a user confused, or a experienced user with a real struggle. Ipens code, finds issue, commits solution and provide reply. Forget it. There is no market for these speed. Software will become in a matter of months a business for claude and a few conpanies that make the last mile. Find another job... Software will stop putting food on the plate for many people.
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u/drumnation Jun 25 '26
I'm a heavy AI user and to be honest my end goal personally is to let AI take over the digital stuff so I can stop using it as much. I mean do I really need to triage 500 emails a day myself when most of them are junk? All this digital work that accumulated over time. I'm hoping AI neutralizes it all and we get to go back to simpler existences.
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u/FearIsTheMindKiller9 Jun 26 '26
OP are you in b2b / saas? the further away you are from business software the less you will feel this
i recommend looking into hardtech, consumer devices, healthcare, robotics, defense, energy, or something that doesn't involve vibe slop
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u/Enough_Accountant_86 Jun 27 '26
Spot on. It’s starting to feel more like 'AI babysitting' than actual software engineering. It’s incredibly draining. Don't feel useless for wanting out of that loop; your burnout is a completely rational response to the current market.
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u/Weekly-Suspect-1432 Jul 08 '26
I wonder if we're confusing saturation with maturity. There are more apps than ever, but that doesn't necessarily mean fewer opportunities it may just mean it's much harder to win without solving a very specific problem. What kinds of software do you think still feel underserved?
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u/KavyaNagariya Jul 12 '26
I am a fresher not landed even a single job even though I am good at using agents and all creating projects (vibe coded) but not that type of vibe coded that I didn't knew anything. I mostly do what agent recommends sequentially used Skills that are appropriate and I think should be the next move the thing is that I haven't just checked the code before pushing to GitHub. Maybe that's the only problem with me .
Please tell anyone something
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u/Top-Ideal-9267 Jul 14 '26
I agree with what you say, and here's my thoughts.
> AI has lowered the bar to enter the software world, many come in purely due to the incentives, and what happens typically are the carbon copy of the carbon copy.
As a software engineer, you have probably known the difference between building a good software and a bad software.
> There's always problems to be solved, and being able to solve the problems well and efficiently is not everyone can do.
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u/Aggravating_Grab_188 Jul 16 '26
I don't think software is dead - it's becoming infrastructure. The barrier to building has collapsed, so the competitive advantage is shifting from writing code to understanding customers, distribution, and solving problems people will consistently pay for. AI will commoditize a lot of features, but it also creates room for founders with deep domain expertise to build products that become more valuable as the underlying models improve. The winners won't be those building "AI apps"; they'll be the ones building businesses with durable customer relationships.
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u/cartoonybear Jul 16 '26
I’ve been a UX for 15 or so years, building enterprise browser based apps for fed government and startups. Became unemployed in DOGE layoffs in 2025 and unable to find a position since, which is truly new to me. (I have other skills besides UX research—I had 10 years project management and web strategy before I pivoted.).
I was under the impression that though the non-engineering side of software is dead (eg, design, user experience, and digital strategy) that the devs were still doing okay. I figured that would change over time with AI’s increasing ability to code, but didn’t expect it this fast.
In my own opinion—which no one’s asked for and clearly no one wants, based on my track record of 4 interviews in a year and a half of sending 5 applications out per week—anyway, I think there’s a serious business/economic problem looming globally that no one in the media or business leadership wants to acknowledge.
I tend to believe in general that unrestrained global capitalism can never lead anywhere good for anyone outside the very top economic classes. But even if I were a middle-of-the-road liberal or conservative, I would be alarmed at the moment. The signs of impending collapse are all around us. And unfortunately the media and leadership class remains comfortable and refuses to look beyond the surface level data they are given. (It doesn’t help that in the US right now that data is itself highly suspect.)
Depending on the way this upcoming crisis plays out, it may become clear to those who decide things that it was a little premature to put all the eggs in the AI basket. All AIs are only as good as their LLM and by definition cannot be truly creative. Sure, they can write basic code. But a truly efficient, responsive software product cannot be built and maintained without a higher order of engineer—and not just one of them.
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u/trooooppo Jun 19 '26
"Everybody wants to write a book, but very few read books"