The Next Frontier: When Anyone Can Build Anything with AI

How AI is Rewriting the Rules of Building Products

I've been consumed lately by a single, exhilarating question: What happens when software becomes entirely democratized, when anyone can build anything with the power of AI?

It's a question that stretches beyond the technical and into the realm of imagination. What new possibilities will emerge? What creative, personal, and world-changing applications will people dream up?

Beyond the App: The Blurring Lines of Generative AI

In the early days of generative AI, there seemed to be a clear distinction: you were either building with AI (creating tools and platforms that leveraged AI to enable people - mainly developers - to build software faster and better) or building for AI (designing products and applications that integrated AI features).

What do I mean by this? Let's look at some examples:

Building with AI: The Rise of AI-Powered No-Code: Claude Artifacts and Vercel v0 are both great examples of how AI is democratizing software development. Both of these products enable you to have a conversation with an AI and walk away with functional code, essentially building an application without writing a single line yourself.

“I want to create a mobile app. There will be a big round button for me to start taking a voice memo at the bottom of the screen, above that should be a list of previous voice memos I've taken.”

Building for AI: AI as a Seamless Product Extension: Figma's new AI-powered features, like "drag to expand," demonstrate how generative AI is becoming increasingly integrated into existing workflows. These features aren't just add-ons; they're changing how we design and create.

But the lines are blurring, and fast. It no longer makes sense to view these as separate domains.

From Rules to Goals: The Rise of Agentic Systems

The real magic happens when we move beyond AI as a feature and embrace it as a fundamental shift in how we think about software. As Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, put it in a recent earnings call, “it's not just a feature, it's not just the capability...It's a fundamental new way of doing software.”

This shift, as Bret Taylor eloquently articulated in a recent Invest Like The Best podcast, is about moving "from rule-based to goals- and guardrails-based. And it's a very different mental model for building software systems.” Imagine software that doesn't just follow pre-programmed instructions, but works towards a goal, adapting and learning along the way. 

This presents new challenges in needing to understand how to effectively build this new type of software application, but it also opens up new possibilities on what can be built! This is the frontier we're rapidly approaching – a world where anyone can build intelligent, adaptive, and personalized applications that were unimaginable just a few years ago.

The Future is Unwritten (But Incredibly Exciting)

We're still in the early innings, and there are challenges to overcome. But the possibilities are exhilarating. This is a future teeming with creative potential, where the only limit is our imagination. I, for one, can't wait to see what we build.