I’ve been trying to sort out my thoughts on AI lately. It feels like everywhere I turn there’s a new, more extreme take on what’s about to happen. Either software is about to completely reinvent itself into a thousand tiny bespoke tools, or everything we know about how companies operate is about to collapse into agents doing all the work for us (or both). The “SaaSpocalypse” fear is real, especially among certain software communities.
And then I read a post last week from Jason Fried pushing back pretty hard on the whole “everyone will build their own custom software” idea. It stuck with me more than I expected because it actually lined up with what I keep seeing day to day.
Table of Contents
- What I’m Actually Seeing as a Software Founder
- EOS Was Never About the Tools — It’s About What They Channel
- Where AI Actually Fits (For Me)
- The Ground-Level Reality Check
- AI Will Accelerate Entrepreneurship
- Where This Leaves Me
What I’m Actually Seeing as a Software Founder
When I zoom out from Twitter and spend time with real companies, especially the ones running on EOS, it’s just… different than the narrative.
Most teams are not sitting around thinking about building their own internal tools. They’re trying to get through their Rocks, run a decent Level 10, hit their numbers, and not let things slip through the cracks. Even really sharp operators don’t want to become part-time software builders or prompt engineers. They want tools that just work so they can focus on the business.
And honestly, I get that. I feel that tension myself. I build software for a living and even I don’t want to manage a bunch of fragile, stitched-together systems just to get basic stuff done. I’ve always said that great software should fade into the background, not become another source of noise in your day-to-day.
So when Jason talks about people not actually wanting to maintain bespoke systems, it feels accurate to what I’m seeing too. Not because it’s anti-AI, but because it’s pro-reality.
EOS Was Never About the Tools — It’s About What They Channel
The thing I keep coming back to is that EOS, at its core, has never really been about the tools anyway. The tools matter, obviously, but they’re just a way to channel something else.
EOS is about energy. Human energy. Getting a group of people pointed in the same direction. Creating clarity so people know what matters. Building enough structure so that things actually happen and don’t just get talked about in meetings.
That part doesn’t change just because AI gets better and more deeply incorporated into how we work. If anything, the human energy piece becomes more important.
Where AI Actually Fits (For Me)
Where I’ve landed, at least for now, is that AI is going to show up as leverage. A pretty massive amount of it. But at the end of the day, it’s just another tool for channeling human energy — not a total departure from the way we already work, especially not for those of us who run on EOS.
Agents, copilots, whatever we end up calling them, are going to become part of the day-to-day workflow. Writing, summarizing, analyzing, maybe even owning chunks of execution that used to require a person.
But they still need direction and they still need priorities. They still need to be pointed at the right problems.
And that starts to look a lot like EOS.
The slight shift in my own thinking is that it’s not just about managing human energy anymore. It’s about managing human and, down the line from humans, agent energy. We’ll need to make sure both are aligned, both are moving in the same direction, and neither is creating noise or distraction.
Which feels like a natural extension of what we’re already trying to do.
The Ground-Level Reality Check
That being said, I still think there’s a gap right now between what’s possible and what’s actually being adopted.
In the software world and on Twitter, it feels like everyone is already living in this fully automated, agent-driven future. But when you get down into real companies, especially outside of tech, adoption is way more uneven.
People are experimenting. Some teams are leaning in. But a lot of it is still pretty early.
Which again makes me think that the idea of every company suddenly spinning up custom-built internal systems is a bit ahead of where most people actually are, or want to be.
Most teams don’t want more to manage. They want less.
The evolution we see all the time for people in their EOS implementation is starting off with docs or spreadsheets to organize the tools and start gaining traction. Eventually, either due to the size/complexity of the business or just the sheer exhaustion of trying to cohere a bunch of scattered tools into a unified implementation, they move to an EOS software tool.
The idea that people will then go back to the work of building, maintaining, and troubleshooting their own systems is pretty far-fetched to me, for the most part. As Jason said in his article, there will always be a couple of tinkerers, but they would exist with or without AI (thinking here of people with the most beautiful spreadsheet systems in the world and how attached they get to them).
The bottom line is, AI is not going to create software tools out of the box that work as well as the ones people have spent years (and true product and engineer resources) building. And when you’re a small business, the tradeoff of time for convenience is usually a no-brainer.
AI Will Accelerate Entrepreneurship
The piece that I do think is underappreciated (and will become bigger) is what it does for entrepreneurship.
If AI will really lower the cost and friction of building and operating a business, then the number of people who can start something meaningful is going to expand pretty dramatically.
And in my experience, fast growth needs structure, if it’s going to remain calm and sustainable.
Entrepreneurs will always need a way to create clarity, accountability, and traction as they grow.
That’s where I keep coming back to EOS. As AI changes the ways we work and approach entrepreneurship, EOS is going to be a more helpful (and in my opinion) needed framework than ever.
Where This Leaves Me
For us at Strety, we’ve been deliberate about how we’re using AI as a team, and how we’re incorporating it into the product. We don’t want to just be throwing AI chatbots in everywhere. (And never in our support motion — humans support humans, only.) We’re integrating AI in a way that actually helps operators run better businesses.
We’re already building AI into the product, and we have more coming, but the goal isn’t to turn Strety into some abstract AI platform. It’s to make the existing system (EOS) work better. Faster. Cleaner. With less friction.
Because at the end of the day, whether it’s people, agents, or some mix of both, the real challenge still looks the same to me: getting everything rowing in the same direction without it feeling like chaos.