The Four Ways to Build Software in 2025 (And Why Most Are Getting It Wrong)
The Trillion-Dollar Software Development Revolution Nobody's Getting Right
AI is transforming software development into a multi-trillion-dollar market, with agents revolutionizing how 30 million developers worldwide plan, code, review, and deploy software. Yet something's deeply wrong.
According to PwC's May 2025 survey, 88% of senior executives plan to increase AI-related budgets in the next 12 months due to agentic AI, and 79% say AI agents are already being adopted in their companies. But here's what nobody's talking about: fewer than 45% are fundamentally rethinking their operating models.
They're polishing the Titanic's deck chairs while the entire ocean of software development transforms beneath them.
The Dirty Secret: AI Is Creating More Work, Not Less
Harvard Business Review dropped a bombshell that Silicon Valley doesn't want to discuss: 41% of workers have encountered AI-generated "workslop"-content that appears polished but lacks real substance, costing nearly two hours of rework per instance.
Think about that. Nearly half of all workers are spending two hours fixing AI's mistakes. That's not productivity. That's expensive theater.
The culprit? "Vibe coding"-the fast, loose, and entirely prompt-driven approach that's infected development teams worldwide. As Simon Willison warns, this approach ships demos, not systems. It's coding by feeling rather than engineering by design.
The Uncomfortable Truth About Building with AI Agents
Building AI agents is 5% AI and 100% software engineering. Let that sink in. While everyone's obsessing over which model to use, the teams actually shipping are focused on data pipelines, guardrails, monitoring, and ACL-aware retrieval.
According to IBM's developer survey, 99% of developers are exploring or developing AI agents, but most are doing it wrong. They're treating agents like magic boxes instead of what they really are: powerful tools that require even more discipline than traditional development.
The stakes are massive. Andreessen Horowitz estimates the AI software development stack is becoming a multi-trillion-dollar market, with agents transforming how 30 million developers worldwide plan, code, review, and deploy software. But the gap between