“Anyone Can Code Now” - Netlify CEO Talks AI Agents

In the past, before all of this AI, when people asked what to do to be a good developer, I said, like, just have a really high tolerance for frustration. That's about right. For me to understand Next or React or some weird CLI, it's there's nothing fundamental. So it really is just wasted knowledge. What defined a developer at its core used to be being able to write code and understand programming languages. And suddenly, that part of being a developer is getting way less important. Software development will just be a skill. Just like with writing, there's still professional writers, but like all of us also have to know how to to write as part of our job. Two years ago, our addressable audience was essentially 17,000,000 professional JavaScript developers. And suddenly computers can write code and addressable audience for a tool like ours, that's everybody that can use spreadsheets today, which is more like 3,000,000,000 people. A year ago, we were sitting at around 3,000 sign ups a day. Today, we're sitting at around 16,000 a day. We're starting to see those kind of patterns where is this an agent accessing or is it a human? There's also just way more people having fun building crazy stuff. People building like really cool WebGL games and so on that they could like never managed to build before and browsers will evolve really dramatically from this. That originally concept of a user agent on the web is getting real. You see people like have history with their chat tbt or cloud, and they really have a preference. And they don't wanna go to, like, the banks, AI, and talk to that. They just want to interact in that way. The web as we know it is about to become unrecognizable. Not because of new protocol or framework, because of who's building it. For the first time in history, the barrier between I have an idea and I shift working software is collapsing. Netlify just watched their daily sign ups jump from 3,000 to 16,000. The twist? Most of these new users aren't developers. They're marketers, designers, product managers, people who six months ago couldn't write a line of code. Matt Billman saw this coming. He coined the term agent experience. The idea that AI agents are now a core user of every product you build. But here's where it gets interesting. While others are building tools that say, we'll be your developer, Matt's making a different bet. He believes we're not replacing developers. We're creating billions of new ones. This raises an uncomfortable question. If anyone can build software, what actually makes you a developer anymore? The answer might surprise you and has nothing to do with code. Today, Matt sits down with a sixteen z general partner Martin Casado to cover why CEOs are suddenly submitting pull requests again, why the dead web theory is backwards, and what happens when your son's AI friend needs to open a …