First Principles

01 If creation cost approaches zero, the nature of the artifact changes

Think about what happened to text when printing costs collapsed. Books stayed roughly the same, but an entirely new category emerged — pamphlets, newspapers, flyers. Disposable text. Text as communication rather than monument.

Then what happened when digital publishing made the cost truly zero? Blogs, tweets, stories, posts. Text became ephemeral. The default mode shifted from "write something permanent" to "write something now." The ratio of permanent-to-disposable content inverted completely.

Software is about to undergo that same inversion. When it costs weeks and millions to build an app, you build things meant to last. When it costs minutes and cents, you build things meant to be used right now. The default mode of software shifts from artifact to utterance.

This isn't speculative. It's just the economic logic of near-zero marginal cost applied to a new medium.

02 When creation is cheap, distribution becomes the bottleneck

Every medium that became cheap to produce eventually adopted the distribution patterns of content. Music, video, text, images — they all ended up in feeds, governed by algorithms, competing for attention, remixed and forked endlessly.

Software has been exempt from this because creation cost was high enough to act as a natural barrier. Remove that barrier, and software enters the content economy. Algorithmic distribution replaces intentional discovery. You don't search for apps. They find you. Attention economics replace utility economics. The scarce resource isn't functionality — it's relevance. Shelf life compresses. Most software becomes disposable. A few things go viral. Almost nothing persists.

Remix becomes the dominant creative act. Just as most TikToks reference other TikToks, most software will fork and modify other software.

03 The backend was always a consequence of creation being expensive

Why do backends exist as a separate concept? Because when software is hard to build, you need durable infrastructure to justify the investment. You set up databases, servers, authentication, APIs — all of this scaffolding exists because the application is meant to persist.

But if the application is ephemeral, the entire concept of "setting up infrastructure" is nonsensical. You don't provision servers for a tweet. The infrastructure should be as fluid as the thing it supports.

Infrastructure must become on-demand, transient, and agent-negotiated. The human never thinks about it. The agent procures what's needed, for exactly as long as it's needed, and releases it when the moment passes. The backend doesn't get abstracted. It gets dissolved into the market.

04 If agents mediate creation, the creative act shifts from building to shaping

When you can describe software into existence, the human role changes fundamentally. You're no longer an engineer or even a designer. You're closer to a director — someone with taste and intent who shapes outputs rather than constructing them.

But there's a deeper shift. If agents can also initiate — suggesting things based on context, data, and patterns — then the human role shifts further, from director to editor. You're reacting to proposals, refining, selecting, remixing. The locus of initiation moves from human to agent.

This isn't dystopian. It's how most creative work already functions in mature industries. A film editor doesn't shoot footage. A music producer doesn't play every instrument. They shape, select, and curate. The difference is that now everyone operates at this level, regardless of technical skill.

05 If software is ephemeral but users are persistent, state must decouple

Today, your data lives inside applications. Your photos are in Google Photos. Your messages are in WhatsApp. Your preferences are in Spotify. Every app is a data silo because every app was built to persist.

If apps are ephemeral, this model collapses entirely. Your data can't live inside something that exists for an afternoon. So state must be user-owned and application-independent. Every ephemeral app-moment reads from and writes to your state layer — your identity, preferences, social graph, history.

This inverts the power dynamic of the entire software industry. Today, platforms are powerful because they hold your data hostage. In this model, you carry your data with you, and software comes to you.

06 Trust in a decentralized system must be economic, not institutional

Traditional software trust is institutional. You trust Google because it's Google. You trust your bank's app because banks are regulated. This works when there are a small number of durable applications built by identifiable entities.

In a world of infinite ephemeral software generated by agents using services procured from other agents, institutional trust is impossible. There are too many actors, too many transactions, too short a lifespan.

The only trust mechanism that scales to this is market-based trust. Reputation scores, staking, verifiable commitments, competitive bidding. Agents that handle money well build reputation. Agents that leak data lose it. The market enforces quality through incentives, not authority. Trust becomes a commodity with a price, not a badge granted by an institution.