Something is happening to software that happened to life 540 million years ago.

The original explosion#

Before the Cambrian Explosion, life was simple. Single cells, some basic multicellular stuff, not much else. Then, in a geologically short window, nearly every major animal body plan that exists today appeared.

The organisms were already there, what changed was the environment. Oxygen rose enough to support complex metabolisms, and predation emerged, creating pressure that drove innovation at a pace the planet had never seen.

The barrier wasn’t a lack of potential but a lack of conditions. Once those conditions arrived, life didn’t just get more abundant but weirder, more diverse, and more experimental.

Same organisms, new conditions#

AI has dropped the barrier to creating apps from “understand frameworks, learn a programming language, spend years getting good” to “describe what you want.”

People who never saw themselves as developers can now build functional software in an afternoon. Experienced developers can produce at a rate that would have seemed absurd.

The builders were always there, the conditions weren’t. In this new era, everyone is a builder.

We can’t see the end from here#

What made the Cambrian Explosion remarkable wasn’t just more animals: predation drove defense, defense drove new attacks, new attacks drove new niches. The outcome wasn’t “more of the same, but faster” but genuinely new categories of life.

“More apps” is the obvious first-order effect, and it’s probably right. But the interesting stuff is second and third order: new categories of software become possible, cultural effects follow that we can’t anticipate, apps that were never viable to build suddenly exist.

We don’t know, and we won’t until we walk into it. The Cambrian Explosion didn’t happen because organisms planned it, it happened because the conditions were right and life showed up. The best we can do is build the tools, remove the remaniing barriers and accelerate.