The Heat Death of Software

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From Stamford, CT

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I think we’re heading for a dramatic change to how software gets consumed in the next 5-10 years. Before diving into my prediction, lets recap a bit about how most software was distributed 15 years ago, and how it is today.

15+ years ago, most software was still largely distributed artifacts that you’d install into your computer and used on your computer. These applications were largely built by fairly large software engineering teams, working in collaboration to define the product surface area, the set of features, and how the application functioned and was expected to be used.

Today, most of that remains largely the same. The primary change over the past 15 years has been that most software is now primarily distributed on the web.

• Google Workspace has largely displaced the Microsoft Office suite of tools
• Figma has largely displaced Sketch/Adobe Illustrator

This is similar to the shift in the gaming industry as effectively every mainstream title and publisher shifted to the live service model. Software now is treated as a live service as well, instead of scheduled quarterly annual releases teams can ship changes in minutes.

Now we can get to my prediction and what I think will effectively become the heat death of software.

Thanks to LLMs, AI, and Agents - we’re seeing a dramatic change in software engineering, specifically around:

• Open Source Software
• Software Teams
• Vibe Coding

Open Source Software

This is one of the areas of software engineering that I think is currently and will continue to see the largest changes thanks to agents. For the past number of years, most leveraged common popular open source libraries for a variety of problem spaces. Largely driven by the “DRY Dogma” (Don’t Repeat Yourself), most teams pulled in those popular libraries instead of re-writing it in-house.