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Microsoft Exec Suggests AI Agents Will Need to Buy Software Licenses - Business Insider
(www.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 14 Apr 2026
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I think what they’re missing is that it becomes trivial to build software. If there is a license fee, someone will just have AI generate a version of that software that does not require a license. Software companies have no moat anymore.
Edit:
Lemmy: omg we luv paid software licenses now.
I think you vastly overestimate the capabilities of these things, and vastly under estimate the complexity of a lot of different software.
Exactly... it can take humans decades to create the level of feature debt we see in software these days.
Building software for humans is over. I say this and I build software for a living. I don’t write code anymore. No one I work with writes code anymore.
Everyone is at different stages of acceptance with this, so I understand people having an attitude about it. It doesn’t change anything.
I look forward to your vibe coded copy of photoshop, I assume you’ll have it whipped up lickity split?
Someone out there will
Cool, so until that point in time, my point still stands. You can’t just hand waive and say “it’ll happen eventually” and be expected to be taken seriously.
You picked one arbitrary example and hold it up as proof that no one can build complex apps with AI? You know there is more than one example of a complex app. Apple has reported an 84% increase in App Store submissions. That’s pretty much all AI driven.
Right right. There's an AI bubble, and there are AI scams. Of course people will ride the bubble, and scammers will always be with us. Doesn't mean any of that work is quality, or that it will edge out the other work.
We are debating whether AI can write a complex app. I don’t know what scams has to do with anything. You’re simply asserting that all AI code is a scam. That’s odd because major companies that don’t scam their customers are shipping AI generated code into production everyday now. For many companies, no humans are writing code anymore. Must not be terrible code then. In my experience, it’s better than what most humans write. Humans are sloppy and take shortcuts.
You claimed that someone could just whip up a license free version of any tool to bypass the cost of a license fee. Was my choice of photoshop arbitrary? Absolutely, you didn’t give any sort of qualifier as to what counts as “any tool”.
You can’t both claim that anyone will just use AI to build any tool, and then complain that my choice of tool is arbitrary so should be discounted.
App Store submissions isn’t a good metric of complex applications. “The fart app” is an app that any AI tool could make, that anyone could then submit, but is in no way complex. Vibe coded apps have taken off, but what was the last long term (even 1 year) successful vibe coded app? Because the vast majority of the news I hear about vibe coded apps is how they had a major security breach.
In my view it wouldn’t be the capability of AI that would prevent someone from using it to create photoshop. I could start doing it at home right now. But, it would cost a fair amount in tokens. Someone who is willing to spend $1000 or more of their tokens on doing it will be able to do it. I’ve already used it to edit open source apps I don’t understand myself. I don’t even open an IDE and I can change their functionality.
Anyway, this is a pedantic conversation. You can read about the changes happening in the industry here. I’m not wrong. People will have to come to terms with it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/12/magazine/ai-coding-programming-jobs-claude-chatgpt.html
Private companies want the AI cash to ride the bubble. So they'll use AI, or say they are, just to get the investment money. Doesn't mean it's good, true, or worthwhile, or efficient.
The real test is what the open source community does. And right now, they aren't doing what you're doing. We'll see what the future brings, but I don't trust your gut any more than I trust my own.
What might actually happen is AI will become clever enough to migrate everyone's business to exisitng open source software solutions.
People are super excited to enjoy barf slop remixes of shards of exisitng open source programs.
If the AI gets smarter, it could start obtaining entire intact copies of those same programs.
And for free.
It'll be life changing for some small businesses.
It will be life changing for Microsoft and Amazon as well, but for different reasons.