AI is driving a boom in modestly successful software projects

If AI is so great, why aren’t we seeing an explosion of new, amazing software products? If anyone can turn their idea into working software with coding agents, where is all that software? People have been asking this question for years. As far as I can tell, the answer is that it’s spread out over a lot of modestly successful projects: Somewhere between 2x and 20x new software is being created, depending on where you look There’s no real growth in massively successful software projects (not counting AI tools) There is around 2x growth in modestly successful software projects Where all the new software is I picked1 around twenty separate sources — software marketplaces, plugin registries, modding platforms, etc — which expose installation counts. I then compared the number2 of successful software projects between 2022-24 and 2025-26: i.e. before and after agentic coding hit the mainstream in mid-2025. There’s a clear jump in modestly (not wildly) successful projects. For instance, the…