Is software dead? No — software without distribution is

The 'software is dead' take is really a claim about abundance. Software used to be scarce — expensive to build, slow to ship, hard to maintain — so building it was itself the business. Now code is the cheapest input in the whole stack. Any competent developer plus AI tooling can produce a working version of almost any product you've heard of.

In that specific sense, 'software' as a standalone value proposition is dead. Nobody pays for software anymore; they pay for solved problems, trusted vendors, and things that show up when they look. The code is table stakes.

But dead code doesn't mean dead companies — because the business of software was never the code. It's the distribution, the trust, the data, the support, the ecosystem around it. Salesforce's moat was never its CRUD app; it's twenty years of workflow embedding and a partner ecosystem. The same logic scaled down applies to an indie tool: the moat is everything except the software.

If anything, abundant code makes software companies more viable for small teams, not less. The cost of the build collapsed; what you're really running is a distribution business with a software product attached.

Every commodity cycle works the same way: when the product layer gets commoditized, value migrates to the adjacent layer that stayed scarce. For software that scarce layer is distribution — attention, trust, and reach. You can see it in how the best-performing founders now allocate time: the product is built in a sprint, the audience is built for years.

It's also why the most-discussed founder skill right now isn't engineering — it's the ability to find where the buyers congregate and show up there consistently. The builders winning are the ones who treat 'where does this get distributed' as a design question, not an afterthought.

So: build the software — it's cheap now, which is great. Just don't confuse the cheap part for the valuable part. Budget your effort the way the market prices it: the code is the cost of entry, the distribution is the company. Founders who internalize that in 2026 look 'lucky' in 2027.