Software for one, and who does the seeding

We’re entering the era of software for one person. Code got cheap, and anyone can ask an agent for exactly the program they need. What will be worth money is data and the way it’s organized and distributed, much more than the software. And that brings a problem I haven’t seen many people talk about.

DHH said it his way:

The same day he replaced OBS with his own app on Omarchy, because all he used OBS for was recording monologues. Then he added: “All single-user desktop software moats are gone.”

Software for one doesn’t need what we learned

Software for one person doesn’t need to scale. It doesn’t need login, multi-tenancy, feature flags, onboarding, or a settings screen for use cases you’ll never have. Half the complexity we carry around exists because software has to serve millions of different people. Without the millions, there isn’t much left.

Robin Sloan wrote about this in 2020, long before agents, in “An app can be a home-cooked meal”. He built a messaging app just for his family: four users, zero churn. It had no login because the app already knew who used it. In his words: “When you liberate programming from the requirement to be professional and scalable, it becomes a different activity altogether, just as cooking at home is really nothing like cooking in a commercial kitchen.” It took him a week, half of it fighting Apple’s code signing. With an agent, you can do it in an afternoon today.

This connects to what I wrote about knowledge arbitrage. If code isn’t worth much anymore, what’s worth something is what a prompt can’t generate: data. Your history, the movie database, the product catalog, the answers a lot of people wrote over many years.

The paradox: data comes from software everyone uses

That data comes from shared software, used by a lot of people at the same time. Stack Overflow only had answers because millions of people used the same site. A maps app only knows about traffic because everyone has it open.

If everyone has their own software, who generates the data that everyone’s software consumes? Software for one consumes data and almost never produces anything for anyone else.

And who sells the shared software?

The seller’s side bothers me even more: building a software business gets harder precisely because of this era.

If anyone can build anything digital by asking an agent, why would they subscribe to my software? For it to be worth it, it would have to be very cheap, cheap enough that having your own, 100% yours, built your way and changed whenever you want, doesn’t pay off. Or it would have to be absurdly customizable. Completely flexible and, at the same time, scalable to millions of people. Those two together are among the hardest things to build in software. Flexibility costs you in complexity, and scale costs you in standardization.

It gets worse when the product has AI inside, which nearly every new piece of software kind of needs now. Then the seller pays API prices, which are much higher than a subscription. Theo calculates that a US$200 Claude Code subscription gets you about US$9k of usage a month at API prices, and he calls API pricing “insane” himself. So my product has to be worth more to the customer than a US$20 plan they can use to build their own software and still use for a thousand other things. I pay list price on every AI call in the product, and they pay the discounted subscription. I can’t compete on that math.

That loops back to the data problem. Shared software is what produces the data everyone consumes. If it gets harder to sell, fewer people can keep one running, and there are fewer places where data gets created.

For a founder in Brazil, it’s a squeeze from both sides. On one side, the cost of frontier models, which hurts when you earn in reais. On the other, a shrinking market for paid software, because your customer can now build their own version in an afternoon.

Stremio and torrents

The best example I know of this is Stremio. It made torrents absurdly easy. A lot of people who would never open a torrent client now watch movies and shows through it, because you install an add-on, click, and the video starts.

The problem is that Stremio doesn’t want to be a torrent client. It uploads pieces to others while you watch, but per Stremio’s own help article quoted in this discussion, “When you exit player, stremio will close all connections after around 1 minute of inactivity.” In that same issue, someone asked for an option to keep seeding afterward, to “stop people from complaining about it killing torrents”. The team’s answer was short: “Stremio is a streaming platform not a torrent client, this will not be added due to multiple issues.”

One comment on the issue asks the obvious: “Its main function is to consume torrents, why not improve your own content source?”

Then there’s debrid. People who use Stremio seriously end up on a debrid service like Real-Debrid, which downloads the torrent on its own servers and hands it to you over HTTPS. On r/StremioAddons, that’s exactly the advice for anyone who doesn’t want to seed at all. In another post, someone asks what to do when a movie has 2 or 5 seeders, and the answer is that with debrid “Seeders are irrelevant as titles are cached”. For the viewer that makes sense, but every user who leaves the swarm for a paid service’s cache is one less peer for everybody else. Over time, finding a healthy torrent for older stuff gets harder, including inside Stremio.

It’s the tragedy of the commons applied to movies and shows: Stremio lives off a shared resource that it teaches millions of people to consume without giving back.

Software for one will be a leecher

Personal software has everything it takes to become the Stremio of data. It’s great for the person using it, it pulls from the API, the open dataset, the forum and the public repo, and it gives nothing back, since nobody else uses that software.

I don’t think this stops the era of software for one. It’s going to happen, and I already do it myself. But the question becomes who does the seeding, who keeps shared data alive when nobody uses the same program anymore.

My guess is that whoever holds the data will be whoever already has it: the companies still running software for millions and now selling access to that. Just like debrid. You stop seeding and start paying someone who has the cache.

This is a prediction I’ve had since 2024: in the future, only data brokers and AI companies will be left. It’ll look like what happened with social media. When someone says social media, they basically mean three: Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. I think software in general will end up similar. One to three pieces of software that do everything a specific program used to do, in different flavors, and you always go back to them. Niche shared software disappears, and specific software too, because AI does everything.

And software for one fits inside that prediction. It’ll run inside those one to three, as a flavor. You build the app your way, on top of someone else’s model and data, and the money goes to that someone.