Everyone is saying the same thing:

“AI agents will write all the code.”

“Software engineering is dead.”

“Soon we’ll just describe what we want and—poof—it appears.”

They’re half-right, and completely wrong about what happens next.

Let’s look at what actually happened the last time humanity invented machines that could produce something at 100× scale.

The Forgotten Lesson of 1800–1950

In 1750 a skilled hand-loom weaver in Britain produced ~4 yards of cotton cloth per 14-hour day.

By 1850, after the spinning jenny, water frame, mule, and power loom, one worker oversaw machines producing 400+ yards—100× more.

Output exploded.

What happened to demand?

It didn’t stay flat.

It didn’t grow linearly.

It detonated.

Cloth became so cheap that ordinary families owned dozens of shirts instead of two. Fashion was born. Ready-to-wear exploded. New categories appeared that no one had imagined: curtains, upholstery, seasonal wardrobes, fast-changing trends.

By 1900 global textile consumption per capita was 5–10× higher than in 1800—despite production being “automated.”

Steel, electricity, cars, chemicals—same story every single time.

Abundance didn’t kill demand.

Abundance invented demand that never existed.

Software Is Next

Right now, software is hand-loom weaving.

A decent mobile app: $100k–$1M and 6–18 months.

A custom enterprise tool: easily seven figures and years of maintenance hell.

AI agents that can autonomously plan, code, test, deploy, and iterate are about to make software 10×–1,000× cheaper and faster.

And exactly like cloth in 1800, the cheaper software gets, the hungrier we will become for it.

A few categories that barely exist today because they’re too expensive, but will explode tomorrow:

• Hyper-personalized education: every kid gets a private tutor that adapts in real time, speaks their dialect, and teaches quantum mechanics through a Minecraft world built around their obsessions.
• Personal life OS: one agent that actually understands you—balancing health, money, relationships, and ambition instead of just syncing calendars.
• Ten million micro-SaaS tools: one CRM perfectly tuned for luxury realtors in Miami, another for first-time buyer agents in Denver, another for Mandarin-speaking agents in Vancouver.
• Living enterprise software: your ERP rewrites its own workflows every week based on what actually worked this month, not what worked for the average company in 2018.
• Creative tools we can’t name yet: games with 1,000-hour storylines that adapt to your personality; music suites that finish tracks the way you would have if you had 30 years of ear training; phone footage turned into Oscar-grade short films.
• Software in everything physical: every machine, room, and garment gets its own bespoke stack because the marginal cost of code approaches zero.

We are not automating a fixed pie.

We are creating a pie a thousand times larger that none of us can fully imagine yet.

The New Bottlenecks Are Not Code

They are:

• Vision & ambition (what should exist that doesn’t?)
• Taste & judgment (which of the 10,000 generated options is actually beautiful and right?)
• Orchestration (making 100 agents play together without chaos)
• Trust & verification (how do you know the agent didn’t quietly hallucinate a backdoor?)
• Human experience design (the last 1% that turns “correct” into “magical”)

These things remain stubbornly human, and the people who are world-class at them will be worth more than ever.

The Bottom Line

The Industrial Revolution didn’t eliminate the need for human creativity, design, entrepreneurship, or labor.

It multiplied it by orders of magnitude.

The AI Agent Revolution won’t kill software development.

It will be the power loom of the mind.

The next decade will be chaotic, noisy, wildly unequal, morally confusing—and the greatest opportunity for builders since Manchester in 1840.

The cloth is about to become infinitely cheap.

Now go invent fashion.