Is the software era over?
A free tool lets agents rebuild a feature from a finished app. The software was never the advantage. Sell the work.
Nick Pinidiya
No. The software was never the advantage. A free tool called REA lets an AI agent take apart a finished app and rebuild a feature, and it shows why.
Spend on services dwarfs software
What REA does
REA is a free, open-source tool for AI coding agents. You ask something like "understand how search works in the Notes app, show me the evidence, and build a similar feature for my project". It inspects desktop apps, websites and Android apps and returns the code behind each answer. It has more than 250,000 stars on GitHub.
The tech is old
REA connects agents to decompilers, tools that turn a compiled program back into readable code. Decompilers like IDA date from the 1990s. MindStudio's review says the capability has existed for a long time and what changed is that agents can now run it. In one MindStudio test, both agents built working clones of Mac's Preview app, and the plain agent with no REA finished first. Agents can already do most of this without it.
The advantage was never the code
REA copies a feature, not a customer relationship. We think most software companies won on trust, reach and being built into how the customer works. A rebuild takes none of that. If your product was only its features, it was already easy to copy.
The contrast is stark. Windows Vista was widely reported at about 50 million lines of code, and Microsoft has never confirmed it. Instinct, an assistant you text with no app to download, was valued at $10B after a $1B round in September 2026.
Where the money is
Sequoia's March 2026 essay says the next $1T company will be "a software company masquerading as a services firm". It sells the work, not the tool. The essay's numbers: "for every dollar spent on software, six are spent on services". A company might spend $10K a year on QuickBooks and $120K on an accountant to close the books. In Sequoia's words, "the next legendary company will just close the books."
qubit sells consulting and advisory this way. Agents do the analysis, and our people own the judgement.
Do this Monday: ask your team which of your products customers would rather buy as finished work.
More on how we think about this: https://qubitstudio.app/beliefs