Most software today is basically deaf. You poke at it, and if you’re lucky, it does what you want. But it doesn’t listen. Not really. That’s about to change.
Say your product’s ad campaign just blew up. The VP wants a buy‑3‑get‑1‑free promotion online in the next ten minutes. In most companies, this would kick off a chain of escalation: tickets, grooming, prioritization, maybe a hotfix sprint. Everyone stressed. Nobody moving fast enough.
But imagine a different setup. You open a file called pricing.spec and type:
## flash_promo_may6_2025
if cart_items >= 4:
discount cheapest_item 100%
You hit publish. The storefront updates. You go back to your coffee.
This isn’t magic. It’s just what happens when the boundary between “spec” and “software” disappears. You stop writing instructions for other humans to implement, and start writing directly for the system.
That’s what I mean by software that listens.
It won’t show up everywhere at once. It’ll sneak in at the edges — inside bounded platforms that already own the stack. Salesforce. Shopify. Figma. Tools where the system already knows the schema, the constraints, the deploy surface. Once a model is embedded in that loop, a lot of the glue work goes away. The scaffolding becomes active.
You won’t need someone to translate what you want into what the machine can do. The machine will learn to speak human. And this breaks the org chart in interesting ways.
In the current world, building software is a game of telephone between PMs, engineers, and designers. Everyone has their domain, and communication is the hard part. But if the system listens — if it really listens — then you don’t need as many people repeating themselves.
You’re either:
That’s it. Everything else starts to look like overhead.
Jamie Zawinski once said every program grows until it can read email.
I’d guess that now, every serious app grows until it can read your mind.
We already see early versions of this: autocomplete, command palettes, prompt UIs. But the real magic happens when software predicts your intent before you articulate it. Not just filling in blanks — actually shaping the interface to fit your next move.
That’s coming. And when it does, the way we build things will start to invert.
Most people won’t notice at first. Architects will keep using their old CAD tools. Accountants will keep using Excel. Editors will keep using the timeline. But behind the scenes, those tools will start responding to natural language. They’ll adapt on the fly. They’ll let users patch over missing or new functionality without plugins or workarounds or other developers.
This is Excel macros for everything.
Except instead of writing brittle scripts, you’re just describing what you want — and the system figures out how to do it. Long-tail functionality stops being something you beg the vendor for. It becomes something you compose.
So where does that leave product managers? They don’t go away. But their work shifts up a level. They’re not writing tickets. They’re deciding,
They define the primitives, set the defaults, and watch the feedback loops. Every model embedded in a product becomes a kind of UX researcher — logging friction, clustering hacks, surfacing gaps in capability.
Product becomes less about what gets built, and more about what can be built.
There are risks, of course. When software listens, it can also mishear. A stray prompt can mutate a database. A rogue extension can leak sensitive logic.
An LLM with too much power and not enough guardrails can wreck things in ways you won’t catch until it’s too late. This is where product and infra start to blur. Versioning, access control, audit trails — they’re not just technical features. They’re product decisions now. Governance becomes part of the interface.
The main thing to understand is this:
Software that listens collapses the distance between wanting and working**.**
Today, we build tools that people learn to use. Tomorrow, we’ll build systems that learn how people want to work.
And once that happens, the most valuable people in the loop will be the ones who can express intent clearly — and the ones who can shape how the system responds. If you’re not doing one of those two things, you’ll have to explain why you’re still in the room.
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If you have any questions or thoughts, don't hesitate to reach out. You can find me as @viksit on Twitter.