In any conversation about agentic coding, this phrase eventually crops up: “software no one cares about.” This category is meant to include little convenience scripts that are meant for the sole use of the author, maybe some internal utilities to be shared with coworkers… certainly not mission-critical services. Usually the conversation pivots as follows: Agentic coding can implement such marginal software easily, but of course Serious Software is much more tricky. It’s a conclusion that might’ve come straight out of the Innovator’s Dilemma.

The Innovator’s Dilemma is a 1997 book by Clayton Christensen which argues that, even though disruptive technologies often look unimpressive at first, they can still wind up taking over the market, by moving quickly and transforming customer expectations.

In this context, the disruptive technology isn’t agentic coding. It’s the software no one cares about.

In other words: “marginal” software could be capable of threatening the market position of the biggest giants of our day. Bespoke search engines could some day unseat Google, that kind of thing. We’re in the Age of the Software Printing Press, and there’s a lot of change on the horizon!

I’m not the first person to arrive at this conclusion, and I’m sure that incumbents are well aware of the threat. There are plenty of people heralding the death of SaaS as a business model: customers can just vibe-code their own CRM, why pay for Salesforce? Salesforce will probably remain healthy for many reasons. But we still need to care about the software no one cares about.

First, because such software can metastasize into something quite serious, either by design or because it becomes the duct tape that holds an enterprise together when nothing else is available.

Moreover, the experience of quickly whipping up a custom-tailored app upends our expectation of the software process. Every time a software “outsider” uses Lovable to create something that looks substantial and useful, that changes the outsider’s understanding of what’s possible.

Finally, the economics are on the side of throwaway software. It’s cheap to produce and not that hard to modify, especially if you have a limited user base. It’s easy to imagine a world where the software no one cares about becomes a substantial share of the software market, even if the incumbents remain healthy.

The next question to ask is, how should incumbents rise to the challenge? I’m not really sure!

In a former life I would’ve said that “jagged edges” - APIs, plugins, and other extension points - can transform disruptors into enhancers. I’ve seen it happen and I still think that’s true, but I also think many of today’s disruptors are not even thinking about the incumbents they might eventually unseat, and certainly not extending them.

I’d be curious to hear from you - are you thinking through this challenge? What’s your game plan?