Good luck competing with companies that actually get this

Welcome friends, been a while.

In my return to rambling, I will discuss the hot topic of the day — AI agents.

And as always, please remember: I am not an AI expert, I am a biased and flawed human being, I am mentally beyond my peak and declining into my twilight years, I am stumbling through the world trying to make sense of everything and very rarely succeeding at that.

For years, software spending has been trapped inside IT budgets—a nice, predictable little box, somewhere between 3-7% of revenue. A handful of industries—tech, banking, etc.—pushed that a little higher, but the game was always the same: software companies battling for a fixed slice of IT spend, adjusting pricing models to fit within whatever budgets were approved for the next cycle.

And now?

AI is here, ignoring budgets and rewriting the software economy in real time.

nc -lvp 31337
nc 127.0.0.1 31337

echo "AGENT-01 STATUS: ONLINE"
whoami && hostname

echo "The system is compromised. Move now." | base64
echo "VGhlIHN5c3RlbSBpcyBjb21wcm9taXNlZC4gTW92ZSBub3cuCg==" | base64 --decode

echo "Deploy backup agents." | gpg --symmetric --cipher-algo AES256 -o encrypted_message.gpg
gpg --output decrypted_message.txt --decrypt encrypted_message.gpg

steghide embed -cf ai-image.jpg -ef secret.txt -p "fsociety"
steghide extract -sf ai-image.jpg -p "fsociety"

shred -u ~/.bash_history && history -c

Software isn’t a tool anymore. It’s an employee.

Old-school software was like a calculator—it helped you do things faster, but you still had to do the thing. AI agents don't help, they do. Which is a problem if you’re still thinking in IT budget terms.

  • Marketing? AI spins up campaigns while your team argues about fonts.
  • Engineering? AI writes, debugs, and ships code before your standup is over.
  • Customer support? AI handles tickets before Karen even finishes typing her complaint.
  • Sales? AI floods the funnel and never asks for a bonus.
  • Legal? AI churns through contracts, finds the sneaky clauses, and never bills you by the hour.

This isn’t “software spend” anymore. It’s scaling headcount without hiring humans.

Let’s pick on legal first—because it’s an easy target

The US legal software market? A few billion. The US legal services market? $400 billion—100X bigger.

If AI makes legal operations 20% more efficient (which, let’s be honest, is a criminal understatement), software spend in this space grows 5-10x overnight. And it’s not just legal.

AI isn’t “making software better.” It’s replacing labor and making that whole “3-7% of revenue” cap look like a bad joke.

Not a budget shuffle—a whole new economy

AI isn’t just moving numbers around; it’s opening doors that were bolted shut before.

  • Startups and small businesses can now take on problems they couldn’t afford to touch.
  • Big companies can scale operations in ways that were pure fantasy five years ago.
  • Departments that always got ignored can now pull the trigger on projects that would’ve been laughed out of the budget meeting.

The conversation shifts from “How much IT budget do we have?” to “How many AI Agents do we spin up?”

You can use AI, or lose to it

IT budgets used to be a ceiling. AI just turned them into a floor. Companies won’t just “buy software” anymore—they’ll deploy AI workers like infrastructure, scaling up or down based on whatever makes them money.

And if you’re still thinking about software spend like it’s 2015, I have bad news: AI doesn’t care about your budget spreadsheets, and neither will your competitors. The rules just changed, the market just cracked wide open, and there’s no putting this genie back in the bottle.

The old software economy is gone. The AI economy is here. If you’re not ready, well—good luck competing with the companies that are.