levelsio says software is dead and normies already build their own
A three word post turned into an argument about who is actually spinning up their own apps.
levelsio posted "Software is dead" and followed it with the claim that non-technical people are already building personal software without knowing it. Not in a terminal with Claude Code, he says, but inside their AI chat app, which quietly generates PDF reports, dashboards and whole web apps on request.
The spark was @iamgingertrash, who wrote that this is the beginning of the end of software because AI is getting good enough at reverse engineering and improving almost anything, and that the latest models were a step change that flew under the radar.
The examples
levelsio's version is concrete. A normal person will not ask for software. They will say they have a photo they want to manually edit, and the chat app will spin up a Photoshop clone. They will ask whether sales went up or down this quarter across all the ecommerce platforms they use, and get an analytics dashboard wired to the APIs with scheduled crons keeping it current. Then, he says, they stop using most regular software.
He calls the current moment "a bubble in a bubble", meaning tech people are the ones who have not noticed. His prediction is that most people will mostly use personal ephemeral software inside AI chat apps, spun up when needed and discarded.
What survives
levelsio does carve out exceptions. Social media survives on community. Ecommerce survives on the Shopify and Stripe layer. But he thinks those get used by the AI as raw material for building the personal software, not by the human directly. His conclusion is the actionable bit for anyone shipping a product right now, become a tool that agents use to solve their user's problems, and charge agents for it.
The pushback
@tarasshyn is not buying the premise. His argument is that levelsio's definition of normies is a tech-adjacent person, and that a regular person has no idea what any of this means. He adds that the younger generation is as bad with tech as the older one, that the average teen struggles with a mouse and keyboard, and that only a fraction of the world's population even knows what AI is.
The business read. There is no data anywhere in this exchange, just two strong priors about who the median user is, and both men are guessing. The part a founder can actually test is the last line of levelsio's thread, whether agents become a buyer you can bill. If tools start seeing agent-initiated signups and usage they can charge for, the thesis has legs. If not, it stays a thread.
They won't know they're building software because their AI app/agent will do it for them
your definition of "normies" is some tech-adjacent person
AI is starting to become good enough at reverse engineering and improving almost anything
Steal the numbers, not the vibes
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