I’m really fascinated by the phenomenon which Nilay Patel terms software brain. I think he gets a couple of things wrong, but he is absolutely right that a new skill is becoming crucial; I think of it as abstraction literacy.

Software brain is the mindset that views “the whole world as a series of databases that can be controlled with the structured language of software code.” If you follow that mindset to its logical conclusion, you wind up “flattening” your life so it can fit in a database and be automated. Everything you do or experience turns into a row in a relational database.

There is, indeed, something horrifying in that vision, as grotesque as a clockwork orange. Patel claims that no one wants it, though he conflates AI as a brand with automation as a concept - an interesting example of guilt by association. AI has pretty bad polling numbers, as he says, but that doesn’t mean that automation is undesirable as such. Still, I’m willing to believe that automating everything, everywhere, all at once is not all that popular, if only because it sounds so alien and uncomfortable.

However, that doesn’t mean it won’t happen, to some degree or another. We have a certain taste for technological progress and legibility even at great cost - that, at least, is the argument of James Scott’s Seeing Like a State and the reason Jared Diamond called agriculture The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race. I think that if we want to avoid the traps that we’ve fallen into in the past, we need to think in terms of skill proliferation.

We are entering the era of the software printing press, and software is becoming dramatically cheaper to produce. That does not mean that software will eat the world, exactly, but it does confer an advantage on those who know how to reshape real-world tasks so that they can be made into (cheap) software. That’s what I call abstraction literacy.

Simon Willison, no slouch at abstraction, has been quite busy building HTML tools with the help of Claude Code; he’s somewhere north of 200 as of this writing. He encounters a problem, spins up a prompt, and a little while later he’s got an HTML and Javascript bundle to solve his problem. In the bargain he’s shared it out to the world. It’s one of the more charming applications of the software printing press, in my estimation - you might even say it’s artisanal.

I like this style of automation quite a bit, and I think there’s something really interesting about a world in which it’s readily available to anyone whose mind is oriented in a certain way - in just the way that books became readily available to literate people after 1440.

This style of working with AI is very different than what Patel is referencing in his poll numbers. ChatGPT is the flagship AI product for direct-to-consumer use cases, and OpenAI’s Sept 2025 study found that only 5.1% of messages are for “technical help.” Coding agents are boasting MAU numbers that top out, generously, at 20 million for Github Copilot - a distant shadow of ChatGPT’s 900 million. Very few people, when asked about AI, think about abstraction literacy and bespoke tooling.

To be clear - that may never change, and the phenomenon of HTML tools and similar artisanal automations may remain a curious niche and nothing more. But if, on the other hand, abstraction literacy proliferates, and we start to see more widespread use of the software printing press - then it’s clear that the potential really is quite exciting. And it doesn’t require a wholesale mindset shift to “software brain”; abstraction literacy is a fairly common skill, not all that different from general numeracy. It’s not trivial, but it’s hardly out of reach.

Image courtesy of Annie Spratt