Here we go again with the prophecy. "RIP Software Engineers." That half the tech industry will shut up shop because building software will stop being hard. It's announced, with a funeral face and county-fair enthusiasm, by the same PowerPoint gravediggers who every five years bury something (email, the office, cash, programming itself) and then stand there staring at the corpse when it gets up and orders a cortado leche y leche. Well, something tells me it's their turn to be wrong again.

The reasoning, I'll grant, has a rigged elegance. If making software gets cheaper, fewer hands will be needed to make it. And if the AI does the whole job, you tell me. Claudio, I woke up a bit lazy today, build me an app that makes my bed and brushes my teeth. Boom, done. A no-brainer.

Except for one uncomfortable detail: every time this same question was put to the history of technology, it answered the exact opposite.

Picture yourself in 1865. An English economist named William Stanley Jevons publishes a book with a disaster-novel title, The Coal Question, and inside he drops an observation that left everyone scratching their heads. James Watt's steam engines burned coal far better than Newcomen's old contraptions: more work per shovelful. The reasonable thing was for England to use less coal. It used far more.

Why? you'll be wondering. Because by making useful coal cheaper, steam crept in where it hadn't fit before. Into more factories, more ships, more trains, more mines, a thousand places where until then it hadn't been worth it. Every efficiency gain didn't dampen demand: it lit it. We call this the Jevons paradox today, and it's held true for a century and a half with a punctuality that's almost frightening.

I think the same thing is going to happen with software. For decades we treated it the way England treated coal before Watt: expensive, heavy, rationed. Standing up a system took big teams, months ahead of you, and a fortune. And what costs a fortune gets reused to exhaustion; I already told you in part one how they sawed us all down to fit the same iron bed. No need to repeat it.

What's new is that AI is doing to software what Watt did to steam: making it cheap. And the prophets' conclusion (less software, fewer people) is, word for word, the one Jevons took apart a century and a half ago. But I don't think there'll be less software. There'll be a flood. A tsunami. Demand isn't going to shrink: it's going to spill through every gap where, until yesterday, it wasn't worth writing a single line.

And there's the interesting part, the question that actually matters: what gets built when building is cheap? Not more of the same. The opposite. Cheap coal didn't give us one giant steam engine for everyone; it gave us a thousand small machines, one for each workshop. Cheap software won't birth an even bigger, even more generic SaaS. It'll give us what we could never afford: software cut to the measure of each one.

Of a company. Of a team. Of a single person. Software written for the specific case, the specific quirk, that flow that lives in this one head and no other. What wasn't worth banging out before now gets banged out in an afternoon.

That's what I mean by the era of personal software. Personal the way the personal computer was, and the echo isn't an accident: that one pulled computing out of the refrigerated basement of four corporations and set it on anyone's desk. This one will do the same, but with the act of programming. Software stops being a product you buy finished and becomes something woven around you. Like a suit. Like a habit. These days you can buy a sewing machine and with a couple of pointers make yourself a suit. Which might do the job, but it doesn't kill off the tailor, or the textile mill. Quite the opposite. I reckon you see where I'm going.

So no, don't get ready for a world with less software and fewer people making it. Get ready for the reverse: for more software than anyone ever saw, more small software, close, cut to measure. The prophets of the end will be caught out again, like every five years. Jevons already knew it in 1865: making a tool cheaper doesn't put out the fire. It feeds it.