The winners and losers of AI coding

I don’t need to tell you that agentic coding is changing the world of software development. Things are happening so quickly that it’s hard to keep up. Internet years seem like eons compared to agentic coding years.  It seemed like just a few short weeks ago that everyone very suddenly stopped writing code and let Claude Code do all the work because, well, it was a few short weeks ago that it happened. 

It seems like new ideas, tools, and frameworks are popping up every day.

Despite things moving like a cheetah sprinting across the Savannah, I am going to make a few predictions about where the cheetah is going to end up and what will happen when it gets there. 

So long, legacy software

First, legacy software is going to become a thing of the past. You know what I’m talking about—those big balls of mud that have accreted over the last 30 years. The one started by your cousin’s friend who wrote that software for your dad’s laundromat and is now the software recommended by the Coin Laundry Association. The one with seven million lines of hopeless spaghetti code that no one person actually understands, that uses ancient, long-outdated technology, that is impossible to maintain but somehow still works. The one that depends on an entire team of developers and support people to keep running.

Well, someone is going to come along and write a completely fresh, new, unmuddy version of that ball of mud with a coding agent. The perfect example of this is happening in open source with Cloudflare’s EmDash project. Now don’t get me wrong. I have a deep respect for WordPress, the CMS that basically runs the internet. It’s venerable and battle-tested—and bloated and insecure and written in PHP.

EmDash is a “spiritual successor” to WordPress. Cloudflare basically asked, “What would WordPress look like if we started building it today?” Then they started building it using agentic coding, and basically did in a couple of months what WordPress took 24 years to do. Sure, they had WordPress as a template, but it was only because of agentic coding that they were even willing to attempt it. It’s long been thought foolish to say “Let’s rebuild the whole thing from scratch.” Now, with agentic coding, it seems foolish not to.

This is not the last creaky, old-school project that will be re-imagined in the coming days. If your business relies on a big ball of mud, it’s time to start looking at rebuilding it from the ground up before someone else beats you to it.

Ideas, implemented

Second, all those great application ideas you’ve been thinking about but could never find the time to do? Well, now you and millions of other developers can actually do them. I myself am nearing completion on six — six! — of the ideas I’ve been kicking around for years and never found the time to do. Yep, I build them all in parallel, with six different agents running at once. (Thank you, Garry Tan and gstack!)

Now, will there be a lot of slop that comes out of that? Sure. But will there be a huge supply of cool new software that will change the world? Yes, definitely. 

That project you’ve always wanted to do? You can do it now. 

Third, bespoke software will become the norm. Today, a business that needs accounting software will buy a product like Quickbooks or some other off-the-shelf solution, and adapt it to their way of doing things. But going forward, those businesses can create their own accounting package designed specifically for the way they do business. No one knows their domain better than the small business owner themselves. Instead of relying on someone who doesn’t understand the nuances of running your particular plumbing business, you can just talk to Claude Code and build your own solution. 

This is happening today (the head of finance wrote the solution!). If you aren’t considering becoming more efficient via agentic coding, then you might find yourself dealing with competitors that are.

Legacy apps need rewriting. Those side projects need building. That app you need for your business isn’t going to build itself. Three months ago, it all seemed foolish and impossible. Today? You are either the cheetah or the gazelle.