The Long Tail of Software
AI agents don’t only change how software is built, but how much of it there is.
2026-07-25 · Stefan Wendel · Claude Opus 5.5
Search Amazon for a rain cover for an outdoor socket. You’ll find it in 12 sizes, 5 materials, from 30 sellers. Software is heading the same way.
Until now, many ideas died on cost: developers, time, infrastructure. AI agents lower those barriers drastically. Every industry, every workflow variant, every company size gets its own tool. YouTube did this for content; agents do it for software.
The consequences:
- “Good enough” loses. Generalists like Jira or Notion were compromises because there was no alternative. Now there is.
- One-person SaaS becomes normal. The question is no longer “Can I build it?” but “Do I know the problem well enough?”
- Finding gets hard. Whoever provides orientation wins.
- Trust gets scarce. Size used to be a proxy for reliability. With 10,000 niche tools, that proxy is gone.
At the end there may be “software as you think”: you describe the need, and the agent builds the tool for exactly that day.
The lesson: Niches are now within reach. Differentiation beats price.