There has never been a better time to build than now!
I have always been inspired and motivated by building products that challenge the status quo, and I genuinely believe that there has never been a better time to build such products. Over the years I've worked with software from many different perspectives, from design and product management, to technical implementation. My experience says that good software requires input from all three. Historically in the tech sector, bottlenecks when working from idea to production would often emerge at the boundaries between them, making product development time consuming and expensive. Today, coding agents changed all of that, and it's why I believe there has never been a better time to build.
Why has there never been a better time?
- From scarcity to access: Coding agents give individuals and small teams access to good input across all of the above mentioned dimensions of software development, like never before. Skills and knowledge from these disciplines that were previously scarce and difficult to reach are now much more accessible to anyone willing to use them.
- From access to amplification: Beyond access, these coding agents enable individuals and teams to go much faster, resolving many of the previous bottlenecks when going from idea to production. This allows teams to validate their product ideas faster, and help change how quickly teams can learn whether they're building the right thing.
- Growing TAM: Finally, I believe that the total addressable market for software is growing and will continue to grow. As described in my previous blog post about Jevons Paradox, the falling cost of intelligence opens up for new markets and types of applications that didn't exist before. I think that as intelligence becomes even cheaper and more accessible, new types of applications that we couldn't even imagine will be built over the next years. Additionally, a new type of market for agents (selling to them) is starting to show up, which will just expand the market even further.
What matters today when building?
With engineering, design and product skills available to individuals and teams like never before, here are some of the things that I believe building good software comes down to today:
- Domain knowledge: While coding agents have made skills across engineering, design, and product more accessible than ever, they can't (yet) reliably replace the domain knowledge and intuition that tells you which problems are worth solving in the first place. Deep familiarity and expertise within an industry is still what allows most people to spot the right opportunities and ask the right questions.
- Ability to execute: With software development being faster and easier than ever before, first mover advantage will continue to be important, together with the ability to constantly develop and evolve products. Only the Paranoid Survive is probably more relevant than ever.
- Adoption of new tools: These technologies are compounding, and the edge increasingly comes not just from using AI, but from how well you use it. Context engineering, the right integrations, structured workflows and instructions, are things that make a big difference in when building these days.
- Controversial thinking: Lastly, having a point of view, and let it show in the product. Opinionated product design, a distinct user journey, a specific take on how a problem should be solved, are important and real differentiators today. As AI makes it easier to build, the average product will converge toward the average idea. The solutions that stand out, that solved the problem in a completely different way, that changed status quo, will most likely win.
Final message
Garry Tan recently wrote that our fear of the future is directly proportional to how small our ambitions are. I will add the other side here: I believe one's excitement about the future is proportional to how much time you spend building stuff. So the one take-away message from this blog should really be: be curious, go play with AI tools to build something.
Inspiration: