foo for thought

I sit here wondering what to submit for the upcoming YC batch. My whole life I’ve been gearing up to be a software engineer. Because software, at least at the time of my childhood, was still in rapid development. We had to do lots with downloaded programs, mailed letters, written documents. But now, everything has an app. Everything has an integration, a website – if you don’t have your product integrated in software, you’re not a business, practically. Software has turned into the medium for – everything.

I started aspiring to be a software engineer to change the world for the better. I saw lots of letters my parents would get paying for bills and think, shouldn’t there be an app on my phone for that? I saw people checking out library books and thinking, shouldn’t there be a better way to access information? I saw in restaurants handing your credit card to the waiter to check you out and thought, why can’t you just pay with your phone?

All of these thoughts have been turned into reality. Now, you can pretty much do everything with your phone. You can also access the entire world’s information database at your fingertips. It’s truly the greatest time in all of human history for technology. You can research any topic by just asking an AI chatbot to. And it does it. Brilliantly.

Every single product or service has an app that streamlines it. Some products are completely digital, they don’t even exist in the world! In fact – the most money earning ones are completely virtual! Google is nothing without a screen. Microsoft is nothing without a screen. Apple is nothing without a screen (well, maybe a cool box).

AI has really put a nail in the coffin. Why bother to make software now? My ambitions of changing the world with software are, I think I realized today, over. I never in a million years would have ever conceived of this. How did we get to a point where we’re outpacing Moore’s law? It’s truly phenomenal and honestly, a bit scary. But, phenomenal nonetheless.

And yet, we still live in a society, in an economy where you need to get paid to survive. Sure I’m doing pretty well as a software engineer now, but how much longer is that going to last? You already see in the news all the layoffs from tech companies – there’s certainly going to be no slowing down of that! With AI able to actually code for you in a lot of instances, companies are realizing, why do I need people when I can just pay 200 a month and get a fully autonomous coding agent?? It’s a no brainer!

This isn’t just because I’m scared for my job in the tech industry, I think it came to light when I started to look at a startup to make for YC. I had a couple of failed submissions this year, and wanted to revamp a new piece of software that really just, changed the way people live. While I still think that’s marginally possible, I think we’ve kinda solved software! Like if software was a cake, we are basically just putting our 10th layer of icing on it at this point. The cake is done, the cake was done the second AI became good. There’s too much icing now. The cake is going to be mostly icing and no cake. Technology startups nowadays are trash. There’s no meaningful innovation.

So, we need to pivot, I think. Software is solved. What’s next? Maybe I can figure this out in the next 7 days. If I do, perhaps I’ll become a billionaire. We’ll see what happens.