PERSON
Marc Andreessen
The co-inventor of the
Mosaic browser who predicted that software would eat every industry, watched the prediction confirm itself across two decades, and then confronted the most unsettling consequence of his own thesis: the software industry being eaten by the AI it built.
Marc Andreessen is the builder who built the builder's bible. At twenty-two he wrote the code for Mosaic, the first web browser accessible to non-programmers, and in doing so lowered the floor of who could participate in the internet by orders of magnitude. That act of deliberate democratization became the template for everything that followed: Netscape,
Andreessen Horowitz, the 2011 Wall Street Journal essay titled “Why Software Is Eating the World”—each was an argument, made in code or prose or capital, that the people who build technology are the primary agents of human progress, and that the act of building is itself a moral imperative. The essay's thesis was confirmed so thoroughly that by 2025 it had become obvious: software had eaten retail, transportation, entertainment, hospitality, finance, communication. Then the eating became recursive.
AI systems that could write software at a fraction of the cost of human engineers began eating the software