In the immortal words of Ferris Bueller, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” This could also be said of the world of AI. No, it could really be said about the world of AI. Things are moving at the speed of a stock tip on Wall Street.
And things spread on Wall Street pretty fast last week. The S&P 500 Software and Services Index lost about $830 billion in market value over six straight sessions of losses ending February 4. The losses were heavy for SaaS companies, sparking the coining of the phrase “SaaSpocalypse.” At the center of the concern was Anthropic’s release of Claude Cowork, which, in many eyes, could render SaaS applications obsolete, or at least a whole lot less valuable.
And the more I think about it, the harder it is for me to believe they are wrong.
If you have Claude Code fixing bugs, do you really need a Jira ticket? Why go to a legal documents site when Claude.ai can just write your will out for you, tailoring it to your specifications for a single monthly fee? Do you need 100 Salesforce seats if you can do the work with 10 people using AI agents?
The answers to those questions are almost certainly bad news for a SaaS company. And it is only going to get worse and worse—or better and better, depending on your point of view.
We are entering into an age where there will be a massive abundance of intelligence, but if Naval is right—and I think he is—we will never have enough. The ramifications of that are, I have to admit, not known. But I won’t hesitate to speculate.
Historically, when there has been soaring demand for something, and that demand has been met, it has had a profound effect on the job market. Electricity wiped out the demand for goods like hand-cranked tools and gas lamps, but it ushered in a huge demand for electricians, power plant technicians, and assemblers of electrical household appliances. And of course, electricity had huge downstream effects. The invention of the transistor led to the demand for computers, eliminating many secretaries, human computers, slide rule manufacturers, and the like.
And today? The demand for AI is boundless. And it will almost certainly have profound effects on labor markets. Will humans be writing code for much longer? I don’t think so.
For us developers, coding agents are getting more powerful every few months, and that pace is accelerating. Both OpenAI and Anthropic have released new large language models in the past week that are receiving rave reviews from developers. The race is on—who knows how soon the next iterations will appear.
We are fast approaching the day when anyone with an idea will be able to create an application or a website in a matter of hours. The term “software developer” will take on new meaning. Or maybe it will go the way of the term “buggy whip maker.” Time will tell.
That sounds depressing to some, I suppose, but if history repeats, AI will also bring an explosion of jobs and job titles that we haven’t yet conceived. If you told a lamplighter in 1880 that his great-grandchild would be a “cloud services manager,” he would have looked at you like you had three heads.
And if an hour of AI time will soon produce what used to take a consultant 100 hours at $200 an hour, we humans will inevitably come up with software and services we can’t yet fathom.
I’m confident that my great-grandchild will have a job title that is inconceivable today.
