Every era of the internet multiplied the world's data — websites, then blogs, then social media, then SaaS, and now AI generating content at zero marginal cost. But AI doesn't just write content. It writes software. And when software becomes nearly free to produce, you get the same explosion — in the thing that now runs everything. Play it forward, then see what it changes.
Step through the eras — or hit play. Each one made it cheaper for more people to produce more, and the volume of content in the world jumped accordingly. Watch where the curve goes when the marginal cost of creation hits zero.
Volumes are illustrative orders of magnitude, not measured counts — the point is the shape of the curve, not the exact number.
We've seen this movie. When the cost of producing something collapses, the volume explodes and the rules change. It happened to content. It's now happening to software itself.
For decades, the limiting factor wasn't ideas — it was the cost of building. Software took scarce, expensive engineers, months of work, and a real budget. So we only built software when the payoff clearly justified it. Everything else stayed manual, or in a spreadsheet, or simply undone.
AI collapses that cost the same way blogging collapsed the cost of publishing and social media collapsed the cost of broadcasting. When a working app can be described instead of hand-built, far more people build far more software for far smaller reasons — including software that lasts a day, serves one person, or solves a problem that was never worth a project before.
Software already does everything. A software explosion means everything gets more software — more of it, more specific, more disposable, and produced by people who were never "developers." That is a different world to operate in, and it rewards different things.
The content explosion didn't just give us more content — it gave us the attention economy, misinformation, recommendation algorithms, and creators. A software explosion has its own second-order effects. Tap a card for the longer version and the parallel from the content era.
When software is scarce, the advantage is being able to build it. When software is everywhere, the advantage moves to deciding what's worth building, keeping the flood safe and maintainable, and turning a thousand cheap tools into something coherent. That shift — from writing software to governing it — is what we help organisations get ahead of.
Talk to us about getting ahead of it