There's a marketplace now where AI agents can hire humans. Not the other way around. The AI handles everything it can, searches the web, writes the email, books the meeting, and when it hits a wall, it posts a job. A human completes the task. The loop closes.
It's dystopian framing, sure. But it's also quietly honest about something we don't say enough.
Even the most capable software in the world eventually needs to touch something real.
Think about the last thing you bought online. The product page, the checkout flow, the confirmation email, all of it optimised, A/B tested, hosted across redundant servers. And then a person picked it off a shelf, put it in a box, and handed it to a driver. You unboxed it. Maybe used it once. Probably forgot you own it.
All of that software. For that moment.
We build and optimise websites so an end user unboxes a product. We organise project management boards so a developer fixes a bug, so that an event ticketing company can sell tickets, so that someone can get through a door and watch a band. We market across digital and physical planes so a person walks into a shop and picks up a bottle of wine.
Everything we build, host and deploy often needs a physical action at the end of it. That's what closes the loop. That's where the value actually lands.
We forget this.
The best businesses aren't the big tech companies. They're the farming supplier, the car wash, the tailor, the supermarket. Unglamorous, essential, physical. The end action is where the real problems get solved. Where lives get easier in ways you can actually feel.
Software is everything in between. And that's not nothing. The industry contributes financially and with infrastructure that reaches further than most of us realise. But it is in between. It is the means, not the end.
So build with that in mind. Know what the full stop of your work looks like. A door opening. A box being lifted. A glass being poured.
Work backwards from there.