Christopher Manning

The future of software In the limit, of course, software won't mean anything anymore. Everything digital will be instantly created at will. But in the interim period we'll wander through an increasingly odd in-between age for software. This transition periodwill be defined by three new precepts. Everflux software - instead of stepping from release to release, months apart, software now evolves continuously. Software creation has broken the sound barrier of our own keystrokes, and every model release pushes it faster. There is no reason to wait weeks or months for the next release when a single company merges over 30,000 code changes a day. Cyber capabilities are also progressing at an increasing pace. Bug and vulnerability fixes need to ship quickly and continuously. And every piece of software sits in a lattice of dependencies, each one now shipping at a blistering pace. Software will have to move accordingly fast just to keep from breaking as everything around it shifts. Translucent sources – A new territory has opened between open source and closed source. Today Claude will happily pick apart any Electron app, and any binary shipped with debug symbols has become a reverse-engineering playground for LLMs. In other words, much so-called closed-source software is now open source in all but name, and keeping code closed makes less and less sense. Even the notion of IP and copyright is breaking in software: Apps don't even need to be accessed to be reproduced. I'm writing this text on a personal text editor I prompted Claude to vibe-code from a few videos of people demoing editor features they liked. A mere description of the interface is increasingly enough for an LLM to rebuild the internals, whether or not they resemble the original. Software IP seems to be dissolving like cotton candy in a raccoon's paws. Bespoke features - Now that all software is open source, nothing prevents us from modifying everything. And personalization is just one prompt and a couple million tokens away, so there is absolutely no reason anymore to wait for someone else to add this feature you want. Everyone becomes their own product manager. Want a search box, an API bridge, a custom button? It's a couple of minutes away, mostly executed in the background of your daily life. Soon we'll want to personalize everything. A major challenge appears when bespoke features crash into our first tenet: everflux software. How do you customize software without cutting yourself off from upstream? I could fork it for good to add my search box, but I'd lose all future benefit from the software creator, be it new security updates or other updates to the rest of the software. How do you personalize software that was never meant to be personalized, without shouldering all of its future maintenance? Merge conflicts won't be the exception anymore; they'll be a constant of everflux software. Agents will rebase our personal features onto each new release overnight, and software will look less like a product and more like a living species, evolving through constant mutation. Image: M.C. Escher, Metamorphosis II, November 1939 - March 1940