
Software as Content
If you believed in 2016 that shortform video would change everything, you'd go all-in on TikTok. So what does it look like to act accordingly if you believe that software is content?
Software as Content
If you believed in 2016 that shortform video would change everything, you'd go all-in on TikTok. You wouldn’t just tweet about the trend, but you’d start posting daily, hire an editor, maybe even build a media brand around it.
So what does it look like to act accordingly if you believe that software is content?
That’s the question I’ve been circling. Because if you take this thesis seriously, it leads somewhere pretty wild.
The cost of building software is collapsing. With AI copilots, codegen tools, and increasingly modular infrastructure, the time between “I have an idea” and “you can use it” is compressing fast. When code becomes that cheap and fast to produce, it stops being infrastructure and starts being media.
Software is content.
The Medium Is the Message
McLuhan’s line is overquoted, but still under-understood: “The medium is the message.” What he meant was that the form of a medium reshapes our behavior and perception more than the actual information it carries.
If the medium is software, and software becomes casual, expressive, and social, then its message is that you are supposed to play with it. You're supposed to share it and make it your own.
We're already seeing this shift.
On Farcaster, miniapps are popping up every day, from quizzes to games to entire shows and experiences, that let people post fully interactive applications directly in the feed. It’s not just text or images anymore, it's working software. In the past few weeks, I’ve seen auctions, tap-to-win games, token drops, feedback forms, live dashboards, AI agents... all built and shipped like tweets.

These usually aren’t startups. They’re posts, built in a few hours and shipped like memes.
And like all media, the most interesting stuff isn’t optimized for utility—it’s optimized for feeling.
Announce It with a Vibe
One of my favorite recent examples was Tina He’s announcement that she was rejoining Pace Capital. Instead of just dropping a thread, she vibe coded a website where she had a say in how the entire thing was designed.

It reminded me of early Tumblr culture, where how your blog looked said as much as what you wrote. But now the medium is fully interactive and customizable.
We’re entering an entirely new media environment.
Taking Software Seriously
So let’s say you believe that software is becoming a new kind of content that is ephemeral, expressive, viral, and remixable.
What does acting accordingly look like?
Ship apps like you post tweets.Start treating apps as creative drops, not long-term products. The same way a designer might post a concept or a writer might post a half-formed thought, you can post a functional miniapp. Even better if it only makes sense right now.
Build for feeds, not homepages.Feeds like Farcaster, Dev.to, even Coinbase Wallet are where software spreads. A miniapp in-feed performs like a viral video. A personal site with a tool buried three clicks deep doesn’t. If software is content, it needs distribution surfaces that treat it as such.
Make the experience the message.If the medium is software, then what it feels like to use matters more than what it technically does. Tina’s announcement worked not because it was interactive, but because the interaction fit the moment. The design carried intent and the announcement became art.
Use AI to create casually.We’re at the point where anyone who can write a paragraph can build a working interface. Tools like v0, Replit, Lovable, etc. are collapsing the gap between idea and implementation. If you’re a designer, founder, strategist, or researcher, you now have direct access to software as a medium.
Play.That’s the main thing. The people who are getting this right are experimenting. They’re building apps with no business model or tangible goals. That’s what early content ecosystems always look like. It’s not serious yet, but it’s very real.
Where's the Scene?
The sign that something’s becoming an important medium is that it starts to attract a scene.
Shortform video had its scene in Musical.ly → TikTok. Indie blogging had its scene across Wordpress, Tumblr, Twitter, and now Substack. Code-as-content is starting to form a scene on Farcaster, Base, and across the indie hackers community.
If you believe software is becoming content, then now is the time to build like it.
Start shipping apps the way you’d write. Design software the way you’d tell a story. Treat every interface like a surface for meaning.
The stories of the frontier will be told through code.