W.I.S.H – Whatever I Say Happens – Programming

When Anyone Can Build Software, What Will CIOs Actually Invest In?

Every two weeks, I find myself sitting pretty on an airplane; with just enough connectivity to triage emails and Slack notifications, but not enough to do real work. These flights have become my thinking time; moments to step back and consider how the forces reshaping technology will affect our business, our customers, and the decisions that technology leaders face. Some of these thought experiments feel worth sharing. Here's the first one of 2026.

The End of Proprietary as a Moat

We're entering a software era where claiming "proprietary technology" as a competitive advantage is starting to feel not quaint but naive, like written in crayons. Engineering roadmaps as differentiators? Increasingly questionable. "Competitive moats" built purely on code? More like suggestions.

What we’ve been calling "vibe coding"; the casual ability to describe what you want and have AI generate working code, is rapidly evolving into something more significant. Call it W.I.S.H programming: Whatever I Say, Happens. And I don't mean entertaining but useless demos or toy applications. I mean functional backends, polished interfaces, scalable cloud infrastructure, tested and deployable. The whole stack.

Today, if you understand software architecture at the level of a competent project manager—someone who grasps how the components of a SaaS application connect, even if you've never written a line of code—you can build genuinely useful applications by describing what you need in plain English. Yes, there's still an interpretation dance between your intent and what the AI produces. Yes, quality and reliability still depend on your technical judgment about what needs testing and how components should integrate. But these systems are improving rapidly. Soon, they'll embed every best practice known for every layer of the stack automatically, bringing a level of attention to detail that currently requires years of engineering experience. All there, ready for you to just say it and see it magically happen before your eyes.

We're approaching a threshold where functional software can be thought into existence rather than coded into reality in the traditional sense. Even if that is a far-fetched exaggeration, I am inviting you to imagine a future where: software is a commodity, in which if we do not have our ears glued to the ground, we will all just be selling or buying reheated lasagna at different price points.

The Gmail Paradox

Follow this trajectory to its logical conclusion, and you arrive at an uncomfortable question: In a world where software becomes a commodity, where does durable value actually reside?

Consider Gmail. In the software-as-commodity future, cloning Gmail will be a weekend project. Building better versions of Gmail—with improved spam filtering, smarter categorization, better search—will be similarly trivial. The technical barriers that once protected established products are dissolving.

And yet.

No one is going to successfully storm that castle with an overnight Gmail clone, no matter how technically superior. Why? Because Gmail by itself isn't the product. Google Workspace is. And Google Workspace isn't just software—it's organizational infrastructure. It's the accumulated context of every conversation your company has ever had, every calendar invite, every shared document, every nested folder that someone has been curating since 2014.

Companies don't use Google Workspace because it's the theoretically optimal solution. They use it because now they are full people that have 47 nested folders that they’ve been curating since 2014, and if you try to migrate them to anything else, they will burn the place to the  ground. They are recurrent customers, because migration would require organizational consensus that simply doesn't exist. That accumulated context isn't a feature. It's gravity. It's the business.

The principles that governed SaaS when the industry began—network effects, switching costs, data gravity—will still apply a decade from now. But they'll apply to different things.

What Actually Survives

In a future where anyone can build anything, value doesn't reside solely in what you build, even if it elegantly solves a clearly defined problem. If it solves that problem for a single team in isolation, it may be displaced by internally vibed tools that fit their specific workflow perfectly.

CIOs are going to face a constant calibration: Is this externally-sourced solution preventing technical debt, or is it creating friction we could eliminate by building something custom? When the cost of building drops dramatically, the calculus changes.

So where does sustained value live? I keep returning to a deceptively simple question: What do humans still need to agree on?

The answer points toward systems that can't simply be vibed into existence by any individual team, because their value depends on coordination across organizational boundaries. These are the systems where building in isolation creates more problems than it solves.

Trust as the Scarce Resource

Here's the realization that keeps crystallizing for me: AI is racing to make building software dramatically cheaper than it's ever been. But the faster that race progresses, the more expensive trust becomes.

Think about the implications. When every team can spin up internal tools overnight, who decides which source of truth actually matters? When you can clone any workflow application, who ensures the clone doesn't harbor compliance violations or security vulnerabilities that no one thought to check?

The winners in this landscape won't simply be the builders of workflow applications. They'll be the providers of what I've started calling "agreement infrastructure"—the systems of record where decisions get made, documented, and recognized by other parties. Approvals. Reviews. Planning. Compliance attestation. The unglamorous connective tissue between "I built a thing" and "other people can rely on it."

Wherever humans still need to make decisions together—and have those decisions carry weight beyond their immediate team—there's a durable business.

The Synthesis

The question I keep wrestling with: Can you deliver both? Can you provide the creative velocity that WISH programming enables while also building genuine agreement infrastructure—the kind that creates organizational gravity rather than technical debt?

That intersection—between radical accessibility and institutional trust—may be where the gravity rules of traditional SaaS and the new era of software commoditization find equilibrium. Where sustainable businesses will actually be built.

For CIOs navigating investment decisions, I'd suggest the filter isn't "what problems does this solve?" It's "what agreements does this enable, and how hard would those agreements be to recreate?"

The lasagna might be getting commoditized. The kitchen where everyone agrees to eat together? That's still worth building.