Last year, I wrote about how YouTube is a pretty great herald of what we can expect to happen to coding. YouTube launching in 2005 didn't seem to fill an obvious content gap, and yet two decades later it's a $550bn business that's more culturally relevant than traditional TV.
We're now seeing the same long-tail creation wave for software.
If you've been on X the past few weeks, you've seen it happening: Tobi built a custom MRI dashboard that (according to the professionals) should’ve required commercial software to view. Marc is generating a techno-optimist movie and novel recommender with Wabi. Levelsio and Joe Weisenthal are architecting apps live for an audience. People are shipping entire ad campaigns from the CLI. If you previously had excuses for not building something, they just got a lot less convincing.
Before LLMs, all of these apps might have never existed. Who had the time to dig through unfamiliar API documentation, or write custom medical imaging software, or allocate what might take weeks of time to build software that may never leave localhost? Especially if you weren’t a programmer, there were seemingly insurmountable barriers to creation. You had to learn how to code, for one. And then you had to stay up-to-date with a whole catalogue of frameworks, and if you stopped paying attention, the industry would move on without you.
Tools like Cursor, Codex, Claude Code, Replit and Wabi have compressed the time from idea to working app from weeks to hours. If you programmed years ago but aren't current on Next.js releases, it doesn't matter anymore. If you've never programmed, you can type into a text box and see what happens. Today, anyone can ship an app.
https://x.com/pmarca/status/2010858340088479886
What YouTube Teaches Us
Think about video creation as a medium. For most of its history, directors needed a green light and funding. In the late 80s and early 90s, the reins loosened: directors like PTA, Soderbergh, and Tarantino all got started with small budgets and non-professional crews. In the 2000s, barriers collapsed further when everyone got a camera in their pocket and platforms like YouTube changed what could qualify as entertainment.
It took a few years for YouTube to evolve from cat videos to Mr. Beast challenges. But after that evolution, we entered the media ecosystem we're in now, where it's as common for entertainment to come from creators on YouTube as from traditional broadcasters.
Software is following the same path: the Hollywood era (deep expertise, tens of millions to build anything) gave way to the 90s indie director era (YC founders like Chesky and Armstrong as outsiders breaking in) which led to the YouTube era (an LLM at everyone's fingertips).