Like breakfast at a diner, software is cheap & fast to make. Ask for a new task management tool & you’ll have the first version in less time & for less money than an omelette. AI-built tools may not last long. Some survive only a few minutes, long enough to answer “What’s our turnaround time this week?” Others remain useful for a few days or weeks, like an app that can spin up a lightweight project tracker for onboarding Walmart. Sometimes they persist beyond a month. If permanence defined the last two decades of software, impermanence may define the next. We now see three layers forming along a continuum: Durable SaaS: long-lived systems of record like a pipeline dashboard. Ephemeral Apps: short-lived tools like the Walmart onboarding project tracker. Instant Questions: one-off queries such as “Tell me about the Apple account.” By orders of magnitude, ephemeral apps & instant questions will outnumber SaaS applications, perhaps millions to one. The dopamine high of instant problem-solving is addictive & accelerates careers. Underpinning all of these applications will be a system of record, often an existing platform but increasingly a new one. Finance & operations teams depend on persistent dashboards for governance & reporting, as if the definition of a metric could be standardized across the organization. Marketers spin up data apps that last a few months to analyze their paid spend performance, & support teams ask quick questions about turnaround time before moving on. The trusted models, permissions, & business logic of an underlying BI platform like @omni give users confidence to experiment with ephemeral apps & instant questions. Control of the foundation ensures control of the layers above. This design pattern extends beyond AI to most other software. Whether you’ll have a coffee, an omelette, or a five-course meal, the next great startup will serve it all.

Understanding technology is at the core of how we research new theories. As part of that effort, Theory is starting a developer relations team. Developer relations for venture capital? What does that mean? Internally, we’ve built hundreds of agents, we’ve struggled to debug tool calls, tested large action models, & work through AI every day. We’ve hosted events on how to build with AI. We’d like to contribute back to the community with our experiences & learn from other builders. All of our workflows of the last decade have suddenly changed. Our broader community is exploring what new workflows are possible & which are best. This new effort is another step in that direction. So if you see Mischa, our new developer relations lead, at an event, say hi! He’ll have plenty to share!