Is AI Really taking over software?

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Or, The lessons of History.


The Hype Curve (or by the stuggey analyst name - technology adoption curve) of adoption has become a cliche in technology circles, and like many other cliches, its anchored in experience and history.

By Olga Tarkovskiy - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27546041


It inevitably raises questions about any new technology - is it pure hype? Where is it on the curve?

Despite the fact that the curve itself is driven by history, discussions often rage for long times about how to answer these questions about any new technology wave.

Obviously, the same is happening around AI. How can you tell that AI Adoption is maturing? What is a good parallel or pattern matching hint?


That last big trend to flow across software development was Containerization. First there was Docker which was the new cool kid (parallel OpenAI). Then there were competitors (ala Rancher) and eventually standardization in the form of Open Container Initiative and a few others.

Standardization also matured the market considerably. The 80% gorilla became open source solutions, with various niche solutions targeting some unique needs. Standardization helped even the laggards adopt the technology, and adoption (arguably) became a necessity.


The expanded adoption was not the end game. As usage increased, new problems and oppurtunities emerged and the battleground for competition has moved up the stack to the Container Orchestration level (#K8S, #Rancher, #Swarm and friends) and hosted solutions (#EKS, #GKS, #ACS) from cloud providers.

How does this map to AI and the broader Hype Curve?

When solutions to higher level concerns (K8S in the case of containers) it's a good indication that the adoption of the layers below is sufficient to (profitably) support these solutions. The base addressable market in the layers below has been grown sufficiently to provide customers who are cognizant of these issues and are fishing for startups to address them.


Mapping to AI, note where the giants are going - AntiGravity from Google (the artist previously known as WindSurf) and Kiro from AWS are just the beginning. (Did AWS develop Kiro purely internally? Or was there some behind the scene acquisition action? You judge).


While The Giants are making moves, the explosion of fast moving startups is staggering. Here's but one example.



Where will the next battle ground be fought? I'll place my bets at yet another layer in the Software Development lifecycle - Value Delivery.

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