What's this about?
Thariq's framing of what agentic coding is actually for: for its entire existence, building software has been unreliable — most projects ran late, over budget, and still missed user needs. And if you were a small or medium business, you simply couldn't get good software built for you at all. That last group, he argues, is the real market for the "software factory."
What exactly was the problem for small businesses?
Custom software has a cost floor set by developer time, and that floor has always been well above what a small business can justify. A dental practice that wants scheduling matching how it actually works has three options: buy generic software and change how it works, pay an agency more than the problem is worth, or use spreadsheets. So an enormous amount of the economy runs on ill-fitting tools not because better ones are impossible but because the economics never worked. The claim is that when building drops far enough in cost, that entire tier becomes addressable for the first time.
Why is this worth noticing?
- It reframes the market question. Most agentic-coding discourse is about whether it replaces professional developers; this points at demand that was never served at all, where the comparison isn't a developer but a spreadsheet.
- It pairs with today's extensible-software thread from the opposite direction — one argues software should be extensible by anyone, the other that software should be buildable for anyone.
- The historical claim is the load-bearing part, and it's well supported: software project failure rates have been dismal for decades, which is why "it will still be unreliable, just cheaper" is the obvious counterargument.