Dustin Boston

In Software Survival 3.0 Steve Yegge lays out a model for software survivability that states, roughly: AI is advancing exponentially, and in a world where agents can synthesize almost any software on demand, only certain kinds of software will survive. It basically assumes that AI is cheap and lazy and will reach for tools (aka your tools) that have the following characteristics:

1. Knowledge dense. They embody decades of knowledge and would be too expensive for an AI to build from scratch.
2. Efficient. They run more efficiently on CPUs than on GPU inference.
3. Broadly useful. They are general-purpose tools with wide applicability.
4. Familiar. Agents have to know your tool exists in terms (via popularity, documentation, etc.) or at least how to find it.
5. Low Friction. Interestingly, their hallucinations should work, docs reinforce intuitive behavior.
6. Appeal to humans. Whether it is human curated, human created, or human experiences.

There’s a fun story about Beads, which has evolved over 100 sub-commands, intended for use by AI.