AI Is Changing What Software Is Worth Building

AI Is Changing What Software Is Worth Building

The future of software may not be bigger products. It may be smaller, smarter solutions to real-world workflows.

A few days ago, I came across a post from a developer who built an iOS application for people visiting his conference booth.

Visitors could sign in, receive a 90-second product pitch, and have their information sent directly to his CRM. He even brought a second device in case multiple visitors showed up at once.

My first reaction was simple.

That’s overkill.

An entire application for a conference booth?

Then I spent a few more minutes thinking about it and realized something.

The overkill wasn’t the software. It was my thinking.

For years, we’ve been conditioned to think about software in a particular way. Whenever we come up with an idea, we immediately ask questions like:

• Can this become a SaaS product?
• Is it scalable?
• What’s the business model?
• Will thousands of people use it?
• Is it worth spending months building?

Those questions made perfect sense when software was expensive to build.

If something takes six months to develop, it needs to justify six months of engineering effort.

But AI is quietly changing that equation.

And I don’t think we’ve fully realized what that means yet.

We’ve Been Thinking Too Big

This is something I personally struggle with.

Whenever I have an idea, my brain immediately starts turning it into:

• A product
• A startup
• A platform
• An ecosystem
• A six-month roadmap

A simple problem quickly becomes something much bigger than it needs to be.

The irony is that many of these problems never needed a product in the first place.

The Future Might Be Smaller Than We Think

We’re moving from a world where software needed to justify weeks or months of development to one where useful software can often be built in a few hours or over a weekend.

That changes what is economically worth building.

Imagine creating:

• An inventory tool for your family’s business
• A conference lead capture system
• An immigration document tracker
• A restaurant opening checklist
• A quotation generator for machinery dealers
• A temporary dashboard for an internal project
• A budgeting tool for one semester
• A customer inquiry management system

None of these ideas are billion-dollar startups.

Some may never have more than one user.

Some may only exist for a few weeks.

And that’s perfectly okay.

Before AI-assisted development, many of these solutions simply weren’t worth building.

Now they are.

People Don’t Want More Software

Something else I’ve realized recently is that people don’t actually want software.

They want their problems solved.

Nobody wakes up thinking:

I wish I had another application installed on my phone.

They think:

I wish there were an easier way to do this.

The software itself is only an implementation detail.

The real value comes from improving a workflow or removing friction from someone’s day.

The future may not be about building more products.

It may be about building better solutions for smaller problems.

The Bottleneck Is Changing

Historically, the bottleneck was:

Building software.

Increasingly, the bottleneck is becoming:

Knowing what software should exist in the first place.

AI is making software dramatically cheaper and faster to build.

That means judgment is becoming more valuable.

The developers who thrive in this environment won’t necessarily be the ones generating the most code. They’ll be the ones who can:

• Observe real-world problems
• Understand workflows
• Identify friction points
• Build the smallest useful solution
• Know when not to build anything at all

Questions I’m Asking Myself Now

Before starting my next side project, I’m trying to ask:

• Is this actually a product?
• Is this simply a workflow problem?
• Can I solve this in a weekend?
• Am I overbuilding?
• Does this even need users outside myself?
• Would a simple internal tool be enough?

AI has made building software easier.

The harder part is deciding what deserves to be built.

Not Everything Needs to Become a Product

This is probably the biggest lesson I’m trying to teach myself right now.

Not every idea deserves:

• Authentication
• Payments
• Analytics
• Public APIs
• AI agents
• Mobile applications
• Subscription plans
• Multi-tenancy
• Six months of development

Sometimes the right answer is simply:

One workflow. One problem. One solution.

And sometimes that solution only needs to exist for a month.

That’s still valuable software.

Final Thoughts

AI isn’t just changing how we build software.

It’s changing what software is worth building.

For decades, software was scarce because building it was expensive.

We’re moving toward a world where software is becoming abundant.

The question is no longer:

Can we build it?

The better question is:

Should it exist?

That mindset shift may become one of the most important skills for developers in the AI era.

Because the future may not belong only to the people building billion-dollar platforms.

It may also belong to the people who can identify a small problem, build a simple solution, and move on to the next one.