Software No Longer Needed
From Minnesota Algae, 1910.
I've spent a lot of time in rebuilding this website and making a nice CMS which handles taxonomy. But I wonder if I should have. I can simply paste things to Claude and let it organize and publish them. You don't need software, in some cases. I keep seeing people building applications on top of these tools, but then you could just tell the tool and skip the application.
And yet. I don't think I'd have what I want if I'd just instructed a bunch of agents to chew through gigabytes of files.
Nonetheless. Software is still software but also a substrate now—a thick algae layer above the pond, nutrient-rich but throwing off the ecosystem too. It's out of balance right now. It's choking the fish. You don't have to write any code at all quite often. But you forsake a lot of control when you do not.