Building a built world
Now, with Claude and Cursor dropping complete packages of engineering teams in your hands (rather than just an AI co-pilot to give you inline edits) the number of people who can build has increased exponentially, which in turn increases the abundance of software in today’s world. There are constant complaints about how a given startup in a Y Combinator batch has 15 clones in the same batch, and concerns about the AI Bubble introducing more “slop” into the system. However, I want to argue that we actually need more people building stuff than ever before.
The line between production and personal software
I personally think the current state of AI-assisted programming is not there yet to ship truly production-level software, nor it will be for the next couple years. But it is damn good shipping personal software.
Production Software
Production software is a completely different realm: almost half the codebase is dedicated to supporting scale for existing features, such as testing workflows, data security and guardrails, error and event logging, and so forth. I still believe there needs to be active human intervention to build software at this level.
Personal Software
However, personal software is much simpler. I truly believe coding tools today can fully ship end-to-end personal software. In fact, the concept of personal software is now introduced primarily due to the picking up of “vibe-coding,” as people previously assumed all software building required the same level of technical expertise as shipping production software.
Personal software might just mean a custom-built web app to track how you’re watering your plants, or a cooking recipe generator. You are the only user of this app; you want to extract personal value from it, rather than provide value to others in exchange for money. And for this kind of software, you can now fully outsource coding to agents as you don’t have to worry about reading the shipped code, just whether it works.
Builders vs. Founders ; Creators vs. Sellers
This democratization is why I argue that there need to be more founders than ever. But let me correct the title here. We need more “builders”, than founders. There’s an clear line between creative technology that’s helpful to you (personal software —> builder) and building technology that’s helpful and sellable to a large group (production software —> founder).
Origin
The overall idea for this essay partly originated from two related ideas I heard on podcasts from two important people:
Ye's argument
First, when Kanye West claimed on Lex Fridman's podcast that engineering should be the only “class” that’s taught. It’s interesting and ironic because Kanye mentions how “teaching” history shouldn’t be a thing; it’s something to be “known” by default, not “taught” in school. Yet Lex Fridman himself, as a person in the STEM field, argues that history should be taught.
Naval's argument
Second, as stated by Naval Ravikant, when he claimed on Joe Rogan's podcast that, in a world where AGI-enabled humanoids do all manual and repetitive work, humans would do nothing but creative work to entertain each other, and that only scientists and researchers would exist to further technology.
Verdict
My own opinion is close to theirs. I think formal education-wise, STEM should be the only field for which you can get a degree. While it’s important to pursue liberal arts disciplines, such as art history or linguistics, I do think those should exist, but not as formal certifications rather, as personal interests.
You don’t need to go to college for four years to have your work in those areas validated. The reason disciplines like pre-med and pre-law require this rigor is because practitioners must be certified and validated, as these fields can be a matter of life and death. For history, you should voluntarily reach out to researchers, get involved in studies and projects, but I don’t believe it needs to be institutional where you’re “taught” history in a 400-person lecture and validated for your “knowledge” in the field through midterms and finals.