The age of infinite software
The new world order is one in which software can exist to solve the problem of ONE person.
When I first arrived in Silicon Valley in 2015, software engineers were a rare, valuable breed. And for good reasons.
Software is one of those few weird products that has near-zero marginal cost. Meaning it does not cost more to serve an additional customer or producing another unit. On top of that, good software are reliable and predictable. Companies are willing pay good money for good, reliable software.
Tons of revenue, very little marginal costs. Who doesn’t want that? As a result, software engineers have been paid quite well. Even more than civil engineers, which I think have a harder job than their software counterparts. Btw, the answer to this puzzle comes down to leverage.
Then comes along AI, and suddenly anyone can code.
For a $20 a month subscription, anyone can have a software engineer on demand. It still helps to know how to code, but the barrier is coming down a lot faster than anyone predicted.
With the litany of coding tools, from Cursor, OpenAI Codex, Claude Code, Lovable, v0, Bolt.new, and probably 20 other names, anyone can prompt software now for their specific needs. Granted they are not production-level code, but code that can solve many personal needs.
For example, I’m always annoyed at the fact that screenshots on Mac just saves, and not asking you to name it. My Desktop was littered with hundreds of files like “Screenshot 2025-08-01 at 4.21.11 PM”.
In the old world order, I have to wait for Apple to change their faulty way, or hire an software engineer to solve this very specific, niche problem for me (costly), or wait for someone to come up with a software and pay for it (unlikely).
Not in this day and age. I prompted Cursor to write me a Python script that constantly watches my Desktop, then passes the image to a vision model and the AI returns a fitting name for my screenshot, and the Python script takes that and renames the file. And all it took was a few hours of prompting and testing.
In the old world order, software can only exists if it solve problems that thousands of people have. In this new age, software can exist just to solve your problem alone, your market-of-one.
The age of infinite software is here. Anyone can write software. Pseudocode becomes code. Your problem is bigger enough to solve with software.
And maybe, your problem is shared by enough people, you can build a business around it. (Which was how BetterPrompt.me came into existence, but that is a story for another time.)
Life Update
It’s been three months since I moved back to Vietnam. Except for the constant rain, things have been humming along nicely. BetterPrompt still faces a fair share of challenges but that was nothing new.
I decided to write more here. If you subscribe to the newsletter, it’ll notify you when I publish something.