I once sat next to a customer and watched them use a product my team had built. I stayed silent for the whole session.
They clicked on things I thought were decoration. They skipped the button we had debated for three meetings. At one point they sighed out loud, and I felt that sigh in my spine.
From that session I learned something that feels even more true in 2026: people come to our software for a result, and every screen between them and that result is a cost they pay.
This is part two of the "Is Software Dead?" series. Part one looked at the business side. This one is about the people who use what we build.
The drill and the hole
The marketing professor Theodore Levitt liked to say that people buy a quarter-inch drill because they want a quarter-inch hole.
For decades, we sold the drill. We designed beautiful drills, we wrote onboarding tours for the drill, and we measured how many minutes people spent holding the drill.
AI agents change the deal. When someone can type "book me a train to Prague on Thursday morning" and get a ticket a minute later, every screen we built for that task suddenly looks optional.
So, from the user's side, is software dead?
What users say they want
People like the idea of agents, and they hesitate to let them act.
- In Braze's 2026 survey of 4,000 consumers in the US and UK, 19% said they use AI agents to deal with brands today. Braze projects that number will reach 46% by the end of 2026.
- In Ping Identity's 2026 survey of 11,000 consumers across 12 countries, only 5% felt comfortable with AI taking action even with their approval, and 3% felt comfortable letting it handle routine transactions on its own.
- In an October 2025 survey, most people still preferred an app for product research (63%) and for finding the best mortgage rate (67%).
So users want the hole, and they also want to keep an eye on the drill.
Three things users keep, even when agents do the work
1. Control. People want to approve the important step. They want to confirm before money moves, review before something gets published, and say yes before an email goes out in their name. Our job is to design those approval moments so they feel quick and clear.
2. Understanding. When something goes wrong, people want to see what happened. They look for a history, a log and an undo button. When an agent acts out of sight, people lose trust fast, and they rarely give it back.
3. The parts they enjoy. Some tasks people love doing themselves. Most of us want to pick our own holiday, our own furniture and our own wedding playlist. For those tasks, the software is the experience, and the experience deserves as much care as ever.
What changes for the products we build
We design for two users. One is a person, and the other is that person's agent. The agent needs a clean API, predictable errors and docs that say exactly what happens. The person needs to understand what the agent did on their behalf.
We move from screens to moments. Where a task used to take twelve screens, a product might need three great moments: a preview, an approval and an undo.
We make the invisible visible. Activity logs, plain-language summaries ("I moved the team meeting to 3pm and told the other two people") and clear history become core features.
We measure outcomes. Minutes spent in the app used to look like success. Now the better signals are time to result, the number of corrections people make, and how often they press undo.
The interface shrinks, and the experience grows
For users, software is dying in one sense: they'll spend fewer hours inside our screens.
In another sense, software matters more than ever. Every action an agent takes runs through it, and every mistake shows up in someone's day.
I think the best products of the next few years will feel small. People will open them to check, approve and fix something, and then get on with their lives. That's a beautiful thing to build, and it's much harder than it looks.
In part three, I look at this from our side, as engineers: what happens to our job when writing code gets cheap.
Which app do you hope an agent takes off your hands first, and which one would you keep for yourselves? Tell me in the comments.
