Different software markets will experience distinct impacts from AI coding, as constraints vary across sectors. While some areas, like personal software, may see explosive growth due to lowered skill barriers, others, such as enterprise products, will face competitive pressures without significant market expansion. Understanding these nuances is essential for predicting the future of software development.

• Software isn't one market—at least eight distinct segments exist, each with different constraints, so AI won't affect them uniformly
• Enterprise internal tools have huge pent-up demand and high developer-time costs as the bottleneck, so AI unlocks real market growth by clearing a backlog
• Enterprise SaaS has a fixed competitive market size, so AI-driven faster iteration just intensifies feature-race competition rather than expanding the market, often at the cost of quality
• Personal/hobbyist software is being democratized like photography once was, letting non-programmers build one-off tools where functionality matters more than durability or quality