The great software expansion

We have a lot of developers being let go from companies, and they know how to code and how to use AI. Tech companies had cut about 126,000 jobs by the middle of August this year, already more than in the whole of 2025 ^[1]. We also have a lot of juniors who learned programming and have no real jobs to get into. Brynjolfsson, Chandar and Chen at Stanford, working from ADP's payroll records, put the employment gap for 22 to 25 year olds in the jobs most exposed to AI at 19% this year, while finding no widespread displacement for everyone else ^[2].

So I think we'll all build software using AI, and we'll all launch products.

An app for everything, again

If you thought there was an app for everything already, wait and see. About 600,000 new apps went into the App Store in 2025, 30% more than the year before, and about 560,000 went in during the first half of 2026, nearly as many in six months as in all of last year ^[3]. Downloads grew 2% over the same six months, so most of those apps are being made faster than anyone can use them (I think that's fine, a lot of them were never meant for millions of people).

The next few months and years will be crazy. Most of what I've read about this calls it Jevons paradox for software, where cheaper code means more code gets written and the work doesn't go away ^[4]. I agree with that, and I think who's writing it is the interesting part, because a lot of them are people the industry has just let go or never let in.

Self-taught, by talking

On top of the people who code for a living, we'll have a lot more self-taught developers who talk to their favourite LLM and build the software they need. Robin Sloan wrote in 2020 that an app can be a home-cooked meal, about a small messaging app he made for his family and nobody else ^[5]. Back then you had to know how to cook. Now you describe what you want and keep asking until it works.

DIY home automations will be so fun and everywhere. The lights, the heating, the reminder for the bins and the thing that tells you the train is late before you leave the house, each written for one home by the person who lives there. And people will program their robots. 1X started taking orders for NEO, a $20,000 humanoid for the home, in October 2025, with deliveries promised for this year, and owners can train it for new tasks ^[6]. I don't know how many are in homes yet, but the first people to get one will want it to do things nobody at 1X thought of.

The mess that comes with it

There will be security breaches everywhere as well. In May RedAccess found about 380,000 apps built on Lovable, Base44, Netlify and Replit open to the web, and about 5,000 of them exposed things like medical records, a bank's internal numbers and customer conversations ^[7]. Those were made by people who meant to publish something. The home-cooked apps, the automations and the robots will mostly be written by people who have never thought about who else can reach them, and the people trying to get in have the same models.

So I think we'll have quite a lot of digital unrest. Apps that leak, homes that do odd things, scams built as fast as the products they copy, and a few years of everyone learning what the rest of us learned the hard way.

You can do this too

If you're one of the people who got let go, or never got let in, pick the thing you're tired of asking someone else for and build it, then spend a day working out who else can reach it before you tell anyone it exists.

References

Read on 31 October 2026.

1. [1]Joe Wilkins, Futurism, 14 August 2026, on tech layoffs passing the 2025 total. 125,759 tech layoffs as of 6 August per Fast Company, and 126,305 on Layoffs.fyi about a week later, against about 122,606 in 2025. futurism.com
2. [2]Erik Brynjolfsson, Bharat Chandar and Ruyu Chen, Stanford Digital Economy Lab, "Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence", on ADP payroll data, revised August 2026 as "No Widespread Displacement, but the AI Employment Gap for Young Workers Has Widened to 19%". Their February 2026 update found the decline becomes statistically significant in 2024 once the broadest controls are in, and they don't claim AI is the only cause. digitaleconomy.stanford.edu
3. [3]Kalley Huang, The New York Times, 20 July 2026, republished by The Star, from Sensor Tower's estimates. New App Store apps rose about 30% to about 600,000 in 2025, and doubled to about 560,000 in the first half of 2026, while downloads grew about 2% to 17.6 billion. The 2024 bar is worked out from the 30% rise. thestar.com.my
4. [4]Jim Rutt, "Jevons' Paradox and the Fate of Software Developers in the Age of AI Coding", 23 March 2026, one of many making the case that cheaper code grows the demand for software. jimrutt.substack.com
5. [5]Robin Sloan, "An app can be a home-cooked meal", February 2020, on the messaging app he built for his family, as linked by Andy Baio on Waxy. waxy.org
6. [6]The Robot Report, 30 October 2025, on 1X opening orders for NEO. Early access at $20,000 or $499 a month, first deliveries to homes in 2026, owners can train it for new tasks and book a 1X teleoperator for chores it doesn't know yet. therobotreport.com
7. [7]Security Boulevard, 7 May 2026, on RedAccess's research, which its chief executive Dor Zvi also discussed with Axios and Wired. About 380,000 publicly reachable apps and assets built with Lovable, Base44, Netlify and Replit, about 5,000 of them holding sensitive data. securityboulevard.com