Code is now free, Software is not

I wanted to write this post for several months now, just because of my own experiences and also what I hear more and more from my network. The executive summary sentence goes something like this: "We are again making our own software". What I'm implying with "again" is the fact that throughout the 90s - with client-server, a lot of the software at large companies was built in-house by their own software teams. I'm seeing somewhat of a resurgence of this development but it hasn't come to the large enterprises (yet), it has started with regular people, trying to create their own software for various reasons. For me, it was a combination of cost and gap - for example, I just couldn't find a simple CRM tool that fulfilled my somewhat limited needs, so I wrote my own. Or for years I've been longing for a PFM software package that could reconcile all my accounts - domestic and foreign, it simply doesn't exist for my needs, so I wrote my own PFM. I've tried to wean myself off from Adobe's Lightroom, and thanks to the coding agent, I was able to write all the necessary scripts to essentially re-create the setup in an open source tool. I'm hearing these stories from other people too. Everyone in my circle is building software for themselves.

Here are some of the examples I've created mostly on the side (the CRM and PFM is private so I won't show this):

• https://swisscompanyresearch.ch - a completely functional Saas portal to research Swiss companies for different use cases (going-concern, general profiling and succession evaluation).

• https://thedailysignal.ch - this is basically one of my earliest side projects. I started this in April 2025 and the idea was to grab news articles from around the world, synthesise, cluster and then present a summary. The first versions were terrible, the clustering was utter nonsense (lots of trialing) but over the last several months, a somewhat decent harness can now self-correct and essentially "learn" how some articles should be clustered by running these trials completely independently of any human interaction - it then creates code & prompts to improve this. The version that I have now is vastly better because of that.

This new developer-heaven environment has been enabled by improvement in harnesses and large language models - when I started my "vibe coding" journey 1.5 years ago, I predicted that we would have no-code solutions so that everyone could create software, I think we blew past this - we're in a world where anyone without any programming background can now create software in higher languages such as C++, Rust, TypeScript and many more.

But what does it all mean?

Today, we continuously improve the software development lifecycle, with all its governance, roles and responsibilities, but I would argue we will undergo a seismic shift in how Software is created.

 Not wanting to be too technical, but in this new paradigm, the single developer is no longer the bottleneck - everyone else is, because the one thing that scales now very well, is that single developer. I will dare and try to outline another prediction: imagine a world, where we have "outsourced" the whole software development pipeline to agents - a Product Manager agent, an Enterprise architect agent, a solution architect agent, a coordinator agent, a validation agent, a verifier/bugtracker agent, and a shipping/deploy agent. 

In this world, the single human is the person with the vision, the concepts, and the features. This is a new role that combines a product manager with a software architect. However, that single person is now the bottle-neck because this whole pipeline can scale - except for the human in the loop. Therefore, we will have several of these orchestration layers - call them meta-orchestration where humans essentially coordinate the big picture work, and leave the implementation to their agents. 

How will large enterprises make use of this?

I simply don't know but I suspect it will take some time for large enterprises to make this shift; But when they do, software competencies will be a differentiator.

Will this mean we will have less programmers?

No, I think it means we'll have more roles that are a mix of product manager + architect + programmer + project manager. I think the pure programmer role will disappear, as for the other roles, they will evolve. It is important to know these tools. 

But this also brings me back to the title - code is free, but software will not be free - it might be less expensive for companies to create their own software compared to their existing vendor solutions, however, the domain knowledge around the software will be costly. Likewise, for anyone creating software - even if the code is not costing anything, it still takes effort and time to produce. But herein is the beauty because now, the barrier of entry for a lot of people has disappeared, everyone can code now.