---
title: "What Is Software, and Will LLMs Replace It?"
source_url: https://tomassetti.me/what-is-software-llms-interface-layer
author: ""
publish_time: ""
ingested: 2026-06-25
sha256: c5fd7bdf2ece9718
tags: ["llm", "software-engineering", "ai-future", "analysis"]
type: article
---

# What Is Software, and Will LLMs Replace It?


Published Time: 2026-06-23T08:56:06+00:00

Markdown Content:
We’ve all been using LLMs for a while now, and we’ve all been impressed by them. At some point it is natural to ask the question: is this it? Is this what is going to replace software? Are we just going to talk to computers from now on, describe what we want, have it appear, and skip everything in between?

I don’t think so, but it’s tempting to believe it. Type “show me sales for the last five years” and you get a chart. Ask for the slide deck and you get the slide deck. Done. Who needs SaaS anymore?

But that misses what software has been doing for us all along. In my opinion, it remains relevant in four ways:

*   Data organized and normalized.
*   Consistency enforced.
*   Things visualized in ways that help us see patterns.
*   Processes guided step by step. Years of accumulated know-how about how to do a job right, captured and made executable.

So yes, LLMs are showing us something genuinely useful: that interfaces can be far more flexible than we assumed. But I don’t think that’s the same as software disappearing into conversation. Let’s look at why.

## What does software actually do?

Let’s ground this in something concrete: a CRM. Yes, CRMs are boring as hell, but every B2B company has one and we are familiar with them. And, let’s face it, most of the software we use does not have to be glamorous. It just has to do some boring job for us.

**It organizes data into a structured, queryable, normalized form.**

An opportunity is not a blob of text. It is a record linked to a company, which has contacts with phone numbers and emails, a lead-source field that feeds your marketing attribution, and a chain back to past contracts. That structure is what lets you ask “which opportunities came from referrals and closed above €50k in the last six months?” and get an answer you can trust in milliseconds, not a paragraph that sounds plausible.

Yes, just writing free-form notes would be more convenient. But without the discipline of organized data, we would lose the possibility of doing most analysis. Also, we are glad our colleagues have to put information into a standard format, right?

**It enforces consistency and integrity.**

You cannot create an opportunity without first creating the company it belongs to. You cannot delete a company that still has open contracts. The system stops you, or cascades the deletion through every linked record in a defined order. These are the rules that keep you