Software is supply-constrained (for now)

Fantastic write-up by Nowfal comparing AI's current moment to the Internet's dial-up era. This bit in particular points to a cleavage that far too few people understand:

Software presents an even more interesting question. How many apps do you need? What about software that generates applications on demand, that creates entire software ecosystems autonomously? Until now, handcrafted software was the constraint. Expensive software engineers and their our labor costs limited what companies could afford to build. Automation changes this equation by making those engineers far more productive. Both consumer and enterprise software markets suggest significant unmet demand because businesses have consistently left projects unbuilt. They couldn't justify the development costs or had to allocate limited resources to their top priority projects. I saw this firsthand at Amazon. Thousands of ideas went unfunded not because they lacked business value, but because of the lack of engineering resources to build them. If AI can produce software at a fraction of the cost, that unleashes enormous latent demand. The key question then is if and when that demand will saturate.

Two things are simultaneously true:

1. The creation of custom software has been supply-constrained throughout the entire history of computing. Nobody knows how many apps were never even imagined—much less developed—due to this constraint, but it's probably fair to say there's an unbelievably massive, decades-long backlog of unmet demand for custom software
2. We aren't even six months into the Shovelware era of coding agents. Exceedingly few developers have even tried these things; the tooling is so bad as to be counterproductive to the task; and yet experienced early adopters (like me) have concluded today's mediocre agents are already substantially better at writing software

It's long been my view that the appropriate response to the current moment is to ride this walrus and leverage coding agents to increase the scope of our ambitions. By the time software demand has been saturated and put us out of jobs, the supply of programmers will already have tapered off as the next generation sees the inflection point coming.

In the short term, the only programmers actually losing their jobs to "AI" are those who refuse to engage with the technology. Using coding agents effectively is a learned skill like any other—and if you don't keep your skills current, fewer people will want to hire you.