Why Software is having an Injection Moulding Moment

💡 Most people talk about AI in terms of the problems it solves directly.

I think that misses the point.

⏱️The real impact of AI is second- and third-order: it has collapsed the cost and time of building software by an order of magnitude. When software becomes 5× cheaper and 5× faster to create, the business case changes for everything.

The closest example I can think of, is injection moulding.

Plastics didn’t just replace wood or metal. Injection moulding made complexity effectively free. Once you’d paid for the mould, adding ribs, clips, textures, snap-fits or hinges cost almost nothing. Entire categories of everyday objects suddenly became worth making - not because demand changed, but because economics did.

AI is doing the same to software.

It doesn’t just automate tasks. It makes bespoke internal tools, edge-case workflows and “nice-to-have” automations suddenly viable. Software becomes disposable, experimental, and abundant - and that quietly reshapes organisations far more than any single AI feature ever will.

📉The cost of bespoke business process software and automation just crashed through the floor. Complexity just became "cheap". Injection moulding changed the everyday lives of most people. AI-built software will too.