Someone who does not write software ships an app and posts a revenue number. The crowd treats that as the new shape of the job.

AI is what made the flood possible. The effort to produce a generic app fell off a cliff. The store filled. The audience did not.

Appfigures counted 448,000 new App Store apps in 2024 and 557,000 in 2025. Sensor Tower, via The New York Times, has about 560,000 in the first half of 2026 alone, roughly 93,000 a month. Downloads in that half rose 2 percent.

A catalog can grow forever. Attention cannot. Once those split, browsing dies and a chart takes its place.

We already watched this

Stock photography finished the story. Royalty-free discs, then microstock, then Unsplash at a price of zero, then a model that invents the laptop and skips the camera. Famous names were fine. Hobbyists were fine. The middle, paid for a volume of competent generic frames, got crushed. What still pays is being in the room. A wedding. A factory floor. A shot you cannot redo.

Music is the same pattern, earlier in the argument. Luminate's 2025 count: 253 million tracks, about 106,000 new ones a day, 88 percent played fewer than 1,000 times in the year. Spotify stopped paying recording royalties under that line. Those tracks were already 0.5 percent of listening. Recorded revenue still grew, to $31.7 billion. Sync, the film-and-ads escape, is about 2 percent of that and shrank in 2025. The song became feedstock. The playlist became the product.

Software work

This is a read of that pattern. Wage surveys will lag the catalog.

The generic layer gets cheap, then invisible. Wrappers, habit trackers, brochure SaaS, the internal screen that is a form on a database. AI did for those what the digital camera did for stock photos. It removed the cost of another attempt. Most will earn nothing. A few will be real, and the toolmakers will use them as the ad.

Over the next few years the middle of product-shaped software work thins out. The person who lived on competent generalist apps, agency builds, and a startup in a weekend loses the friction that kept the count down. Shipping ten more into the same store makes the pile worse. A career that needs a stranger to browse the store is a lottery ticket.

What stays expensive is attendance. A system already in production. The ugly integration, the regulation, the Tuesday it falls over, the client who would notice if you vanished. Companies will attempt more software, because trying became cheap. Someone still has to be accountable when it is wrong. That work concentrates on fewer people who can hold the whole thing. It pays for judgment more than for typing.

The apprenticeship gets worse before senior pay does. Juniors learned on the boring tickets. When the boring ticket is generated, the ladder has fewer rungs. I expect that inside teams within a couple of years. The rate collapse for “build me an app” follows over something like three to five years, the way microstock rates fell after the cameras got cheap and before the pictures became free.

Other jobs AI just opened

The same flood hits anywhere the product is a generic file.

Ordinary commercial pictures and layout. Routine copy and SEO pages. Straightforward translation. A first pass at a contract or a research memo. Bookkeeping classification. Support replies that follow a script. Course pages that explain a known topic. Jingles and background beds. Slide decks that restate a spreadsheet.

Same ending, on a short lag. The catalog fills. The median file earns pennies or nothing. The buyer stops browsing and takes the first acceptable result, often the generated one. Discovery belongs to the platform or the model.

The lag is longer where a person must be present, licensed, or liable. Nursing, electrical work, a courtroom, an audit opinion, a surgery, a negotiation with a human who can walk away. AI will sit inside those jobs. The person who signs, shows up, or can be sued stays in them.

A cheap file is a gift when the file was never the job. A prototype. A first draft you were going to rewrite. The mistake is believing the file itself is now a business, in software or anywhere else.