Matt Biilmann, CEO of Netlify, shares his five-year outlook on how AI agents will expand the developer workforce and change how code is written.
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Biilmann: Custom internal apps will surpass off-the-shelf SaaS as costs drop
“We'll see the cost of building internal applications and applications in general go to almost zero, right? Like, so there will be tons of those and Lots more internal applications than off-the-shelf SaaS products, right?”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Biilmann: Small teams will build immersive 3D web experiences within years
“I think now we can see, now I can start seeing how you could build that, right? Like, which I couldn't really like, again, two years ago, it would just be too expensive for a normal company to build anything with like real free assets and stuff like that, righ…”
Insight
Biilmann: AI agents excel at Relay despite high human developer barriers
“Where the developer experience means that it's just, that's never going to happen, right? Like normal teams are never going to adopt it. But it's one of these interesting examples for me of the shift from developer experience to agent experience. It suddenly, …”
Insight
Biilmann: AI-driven ephemeral apps make scale-to-zero serverless databases essential
“Maybe if you had asked me two years ago about serverless databases, right? Like, I would tell you that, like, I don't really think, like, I've looked a lot at it, and I think it's like, kind of like, Scale to zero for a database just doesn't matter that much. …”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Biilmann: Agency cut backend developers from 35 to 2 using microservices
“We talked to one agency that's really been a pioneer of adopting this model you talked about of building sites that used to have, like, 55 developers instead, where 35 of those were back-end developers. And now they have around 33 developers, and two of them a…”
Insight
Front-End Developers Are Replacing Monolithic Backend Development via Microservices
“We used to have this very clear distinction between the back-end developers and then front-end developers that worked with the web were barely really developers. They would mostly take some design file and then cut it up and hand it over to a back-end develope…”