Mitchell Hashimoto argues that today’s software growth comes from modular building blocks rather than monolithic apps. These reusable components speed up innovation, lower maintenance burdens, and outsource R&D to the community. Mainline applications then focus on stability and core features, benefiting from a wider ecosystem.

• Ghostty hit ~1M daily macOS update checks in 18 months, and libghostty reached "multiple millions" of daily users within two months of release—evidence AI-assisted development is accelerating building-block adoption
• AI agents are now good enough at assembling well-documented components that the barrier to building on primitives has effectively vanished, letting niche tools multiply rapidly
• Hashimoto has shifted strategy to build small components first and let a community fork/build apps on top, which lowers his maintenance burden (he built a "no" machine for feature requests) while outsourcing R&D to outside experimentation
• Closed-source, commercial software is structurally disadvantaged in this new economy because AI models/agents consistently favor open, free components over proprietary ones