Software Ate the World. Now AI Is Eating Software.

Marc Andreessen’s “software is eating the world” line held up for a solid fifteen years. Banks became apps. Taxis became Uber. Your local restaurant lives or dies by its delivery platform. He was right.

What he probably didn’t anticipate: the thing that ate the world is now getting eaten.

Every company has the same SaaS problem

Walk into any enterprise and you’ll find the same mess. Dozens of SaaS subscriptions. Annual contracts deep into six or seven figures. Tools bolted onto tools, integrated through middleware, held together by workarounds that someone built three years ago and nobody fully understands anymore. Teams spend more time managing their software stack than doing the work the software was supposed to help with.

This was always where “software eating the world” was headed. Software won, and then it got lazy. Vendors stopped shipping useful features and started shipping price increases. They knew the switching costs would keep you around. For a while, they were right.

Building got cheap fast

AI made building software cheap. That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

A good engineer with current AI tooling can prototype in hours what used to take weeks. A team of three to five people can build and maintain internal tools that replace enterprise platforms costing hundreds of thousands a year. Five years ago that sentence would have been absurd. Now it’s just Tuesday.

I keep seeing this play out. Companies look at their vendor invoices, look at what a small team with AI-assisted workflows actually ships in a month, and do the arithmetic. The arithmetic is not kind to the vendors.

Owning vs. renting

“Software is eating the world” was about replacing analog processes with digital ones. This is different. This is about owning your tools instead of renting them.

When building was slow and expensive, renting from Salesforce or SAP made sense. You couldn’t justify the cost and risk of doing it yourself. That math doesn’t hold anymore. Teams that couldn’t have built in-house five years ago can now move faster than the vendors they’re paying.

Not every SaaS product dies. But “should we buy or build?” is becoming a real question again, and for a lot of companies the answer is flipping.

So what do you actually do about it

The smart move right now is boring: hire a small engineering team, give them good AI tooling, and point them at whatever vendor tool your people complain about most. Replace that one. Then the next one. Each replacement makes the next one easier because the team gets better and the tooling keeps improving.

The alternative is to keep renting. Keep filing feature requests that sit in a backlog for eighteen months. Keep paying annual increases for software your team has learned to work around rather than work with.

Software ate the world. Now the world can build its own.