Will AI Agents Make Software Applications Matter Less?

Ben Horowitz says the software application may be the thing that fades the most. A person may just ask an AI to do the work, with no application in between. The arrangement he describes is to organize the data and then have agents do things against that data. He thinks that is how both business applications and personal applications would work.

He does not treat the shift as settled. Software can also get so easy to build that companies ship copies the way fast fashion gets copied, or that each person gets a slightly different version generated at runtime and personalized to them. He calls that second version science fiction that might arrive, and he notes that people still wear similar clothes even when copying is easy. Asking an AI instead of opening an application is the change he sees as more likely, and he still calls it to be determined.