After Software

For two decades, SaaS defined how businesses scaled. It turned niche processes into digital products and made it economically viable to build software around nearly every domain. Interfaces were a major design focus—but were shaped by constraints of the time: screen-based metaphors, mouse-first workflows, and the assumption that users would click, tab, and drag to complete tasks.

Clicking, tabbing, resizing windows, switching between dashboards. We scaled our monitors and our mental bandwidth just to keep up.

But something is shifting. The age of the app is closing.

We're moving toward a model where software responds to natural language as fluidly as it once responded to clicks. Software won't just live behind icons—it will live in context. Instead of launching apps, users will declare outcomes. And systems will handle the routing.

We call this shift TeleFrame—a name for a design principle, not a product. It's a framework for how interfaces can evolve beyond navigation. TeleFrame is what happens when software no longer lives in tabs and dashboards, but inside a dynamic, ever-present layer that responds to intent.

At its core, TeleFrame is built on three primitives:

1. The Universal Command Field — A single, persistent input at the bottom of your screen. It listens. You type or speak. That's it.
2. Intent Parsing and Routing — Instead of menus, the system interprets what you want and dynamically loads only the UI components needed to accomplish it.
3. Inline, Ephemeral Interfaces — The interface isn't a static destination. It appears, completes its job, and collapses. No toggling between apps. No clicking through sections. No closing windows.

Think of it as a living layer that sits above all your tools. Instead of switching contexts, you summon what you need in the moment. You don't launch software—you converse with it.

TeleFrame isn't just UI optimization. It's a paradigm shift: away from screens full of options and toward zero-friction interfaces designed to disappear. In the TeleFrame model, there is no menu. No nav bar. No setup screen. There is only one persistent command field—a conversational stream where interface components appear when needed, and vanish when not.

But the interface is only the surface. Something deeper is eroding underneath: how software gets made.

Thanks to generative AI and low-code tooling, the barrier to creating functional tools is lowering dramatically. While expertise and design still matter, more people than ever can build powerful applications without traditional engineering. Small teams and individuals are now able to stand up production-level tools using natural language, prebuilt components, and AI assistance.

The result? A flood of software.

The cost to build is going down. The supply of new tools is going up.

When everyone can make software, software stops being special. As more teams gain the ability to create software, we'll begin to see saturation—many tools solving similar or redundant problems, often with slight variations. The market's capacity to absorb new tools will slow. Differentiation will depend less on what the software does, and more on how it integrates and how people reach it.

Software will increasingly resemble infrastructure—ubiquitous, standardized, and interoperable. As functionality becomes a given, the differentiators shift to experience, accessibility, and control of the interface layer.

In this environment, commoditization is inevitable. Tools become interchangeable, and pricing pressure drives them toward zero-margin utility. What used to be premium software offerings are reduced to plumbing—generic, undifferentiated, and backgrounded.

The only scarce resource left will be access.

Who owns the interface layer? Who becomes the default entry point for user intent? Who routes the action?

We won't remember most SaaS products.

For two decades, SaaS thrived by wrapping structured databases and integrations in friendly browser GUIs—think Jira for tickets or Salesforce for CRM—but the paradigm is crumbling under a new abstraction: autonomous, LLM-powered agents. These agents leverage long-context reasoning, native function calling, and persistent memory to read goals, call APIs, and write back to data stores without human clicks.

Enterprise blueprints now describe event-stream architectures where swarms of agents plan and execute business workflows end-to-end, eliminating the need for separate apps. The shift is already visible: Salesforce's Einstein Copilot (now Agentforce) can draft emails, update opportunities, and fire automations across every Salesforce cloud from a single chat window, while Atlassian's Jira AI triages, comments on, and resolves issues instead of forcing users through forms and boards.

Venture firms like Andreessen Horowitz argue that such agentic systems will "hire" AI to perform repetitive SaaS roles, reducing apps to thin API layers, and OpenAI's Sam Altman frames agents as "junior employees" poised to discover new knowledge and solve complex tasks on our behalf.

Once an agent can observe full operational context, remember every prior interaction, and invoke any microservice, the notion of logging into a distinct product evaporates—the agent is the product.

As agents autonomously stitch tasks across clouds, SaaS subscriptions collapse into metered utility calls—mirroring how smartphones subsumed standalone GPS and cameras—and strategic focus turns to setting guardrails, observability, and permissions for the autonomous workforce that now builds, buys, and sells on command.

Once software is everywhere, the next frontier is the physical world.

When interaction becomes ambient, the constraint isn't what the software can do—it's where it lives.

Which device hears you speak? Which wearable senses your context? Which surface shows you what matters?

That's the next tech dynasty: the hardware layer that enables post-software interaction. Glasses, earpieces, surfaces, motion interfaces—this is where the billion-dollar bets will go next.

Not more dashboards. Not more SaaS.

The future is coming in two waves:

1. TeleFrame interfaces: Natural-language command layers that collapse apps into moments.
2. Hardware-native AI: Physical interfaces that unlock those moments anywhere.

This isn't the death of software.

It's what comes after.

Software becomes background noise. A low-cost input. A raw material. The real leverage moves up the stack—to the interface—and down the stack—to the device.