---
title: "We Can All Bake Bread"
description: "Usamah Zaheer on why AI letting anyone build their own software will not kill software companies. Everyone can bake bread and almost everyone still buys it, because nobody wants to be the baker."
canonical_url: "https://www.usamah.me/blog/we-can-all-bake-bread"
author: "Usamah Zaheer"
date_published: "2026-09-14"
date_modified: "2026-09-15"
type: "article"
word_count: 362
---

# We Can All Bake Bread

Every other day I see some version of this take:

> AI means anyone can build their own software now, so nobody will pay for software, so SaaS companies are finished, software engineers are finished, and so on.

It reminds me of bread.

> We can all bake bread. We still buy it.

The recipe is on the side of the flour bag. It's not like nobody knows how to do it. We just don't want to. Nobody wants to be the baker, and that's what you're actually paying for.

I think software is the same. Vibe coding works. Something that used to take a week takes an afternoon. But nobody was ever paying a software company for the first version. They were paying for someone else to deal with everything after it. The 3am call when it breaks (it's always 3am). The library with the security hole that needs patching. The backups, and actually checking they restore. The customer whose export broke because there's a comma in a name. The payment provider retiring their API next year.

> None of that got much cheaper. Only the first version did.

Sure, some software will die. If your whole product is a form over a database with a login page for $29 a month, someone can make that by dinner now. Fair enough.

But I think the threat is coming from somewhere else. A bakery doesn't go under because its customers learn to bake. It goes under because ovens got cheap and now there are ten bakeries on the same street, all selling the same sourdough. That's what's happening to software. The customers are all still there. It's just that a lot more people are selling to them now. A feature that took a team a quarter gets copied over a weekend, so prices come down and margins get thin.

So no, I don't think software companies are finished. I think it's about to get a lot harder to be one, and the ones that make it will be the ones you trust to pick up the phone when it breaks. How many go under before that shakes out, I have no idea.

## About the author

Usamah Zaheer is a Machine Learning Software Engineer at Arm, where he designs and optimises ML infrastructure for Arm architectures. He is pursuing an MS in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Texas at Austin and holds an MS in Embedded Systems from the University of Leicester. His work spans deep learning, computer vision, edge computing, robotics, and MLOps across companies including Arm, Dyson, and the University of Leicester. Full CV: https://www.usamah.me/index.md. His book on efficient machine learning is at https://ai.usamah.me.

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