Marc Andreessen (마크 앤드리슨), co-founder of Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), shared a post on social media platform X after saying he would make an additional investment in coding agent company Cognition.

The post was titled “Software is consuming the world faster.”

Andreessen drew attention 15 years ago with an essay titled “Software is eating the world.” This time, he focused on how AI is speeding up that process.

In a recent post on the firm’s blog, he wrote: “Fifteen years ago, I wrote that software is eating the world. At the time, it was a controversial claim, but now it has become reality. Now software is trying to eat the world at the speed of computing.” He signalled bigger changes ahead.

He said that since Andreessen wrote the essay 15 years ago, the share of tech companies among the world’s top 10 companies by market capitalisation rose to 94.4 percent from 31.5 percent over that period.

Andreessen said: “During this change, only 1 out of 300 people in the world made software, and all code had to be written line by line by hand. If software has been consuming the world at the speed of human hands, now it is trying to consume the world at the speed of computing.”

He cited Cognition, an AI coding startup backed by Andreessen Horowitz. When Cognition began building its coding agent Devin 3 years ago, the term “coding agent” itself was unfamiliar, but that has now changed sharply.

Andreessen said: “Now if you ask most software engineers, they will say agents write most of the code.” He added: “Over the past year, the share of Cognition’s own production code written by Devin rose from 13 percent to more than 90 percent.”

He said that if an agent writes 90 percent of the code, what a single engineer can accomplish increases tenfold. He said a 10x engineer becomes a 100x engineer, and work shifts from writing code directly to operating multiple agents simultaneously.

Cognition founder Scott Wu (스콧 우) said: “Within our lifetimes, engineers will change from bricklayers to architects. Instead of labouring to assemble systems by hand, they will focus on the creative work of designing systems.”

Examples were also shared. Mercedes-Benz finished a COBOL migration project in 8 days with Devin, work it had expected would take 8 months. At Rivian, the speed of generating test code became 10 times faster. Large financial companies, including Itau, use Devin to find and fix security vulnerabilities across thousands of code repositories, and 70 percent of that is handled automatically without human involvement.

Andreessen did not appear to agree with concerns that AI will reduce engineers’ jobs. He said there were similar worries in the past, but reality was different.

He said: “When compilers emerged, when open source emerged, and when the cloud emerged, there were predictions that engineering jobs would shrink.” He added: “Each time, only the cost of making software fell, and demand for software and engineers instead exploded. Because human desires are endless, economic demand is also endless, and jobs have no choice but to keep growing.” Andreessen also stressed that this cannot be seen as only a story about coding. “If software continues to consume the world, automating the process of making software itself raises the speed of every industry together,” he said.