upvote
> do humans _need_ most software?

Yes, if it's not redundant software. The ultimate utility is to a human. Sure, at some point humans stopped writing assembly language and employed a compiler instead, so the abstraction level and interfaces change, but it's all still there to serve humans.

To use your example, do you think humans will want to interact with AI agents using a chat interface only? For most tasks humans use computers today, that would be very unwieldy. So the UI will migrate from the website to the AI agent interface. It all transforms, becoming more powerful (hopefully!), but won't go away. And just how the advent of compilers led to an increase of programmers in the world, so will AI agents. This is connected with Javon's paradox as well.

reply
> And maybe "looking good" just amounts to exposing some public API to do various things.

Maybe, but you still need humans to make that call. The software is still built for humans no matter how much indirection you add.

There is a conceivable day where that is no longer true, but when you have reached that point it is no longer AI.

reply