I've been thinking in a similar way over the past year or so—we're seeing the emergence of more widespread access to custom software for use cases that previously never would have justified the investment.

There are so many situations where a little program can save one or a few people hours of work on tedious tasks, but wouldn't make sense to build or support given traditional software development overhead, but that becomes realistic with AI-assisted development. This is the idea of a sysadmin who has automated 80% of his job with a variety of shell scripts, borne out into many other roles.

We've seen the early phases of it with Replit and Lovable et al, but I think there's a big playing field for secure/constrained runtime environments for non-developers to be able to build things with AI. Low/no-code tooling increasingly seems anachronistic to me: I prefer code, just let an AI write and maintain it.

There's also a whole world of opportunity around the fact that many people who could benefit greatly from AI-built programs are simply not particularly suited to building them themselves, barring a dramatically more capable AI, where I think enterprising software engineers can likely spin out tons of useful stuff and address a client base they might never have previously been able to address.