SaaS products are in serious trouble, and it's not because someone vibe coded Adobe in Rust. We're heading toward a world where billions of people create software without even realizing it, because their agents write it for them. I call it invisible software. Is your product ready for that?
Better with Kent - durable skills for people who ship software.
Thank you to Warp Build for sponsoring this episode: https://kcd.link/warpbuild
People don't want apps. They want their problems solved. Agents get better every month (we're running out of benchmarks hard enough to measure them), so more and more of those problems will be solved by software an agent writes on the spot. Not millions of developers writing code by hand at the speed of humans, but billions of people whose agents write, commit, and push code at the speed of AI. I call this invisible software.
In this episode I walk through a demo with two barbers, Victoria and Max. A proactive agent builds Victoria a custom client app wired up to her Stripe and iMessage. Max forks it for his Square store and adds a Book now button. Victoria pulls his change back into her version. Then Max tries to switch agents and runs straight into a walled garden (which is a big part of why I'm building Kody).
Software engineering isn't going anywhere. Banks, airlines, and infrastructure still need teams who own their systems. But how you solve problems for your users is going to change shape. If your product isn't easy for agents to use, your users' agents will go to your competitors. So, is your app ready for the next billion users?
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