In 1950, while discussing the recent wave of flying saucer reports over lunch with colleagues at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, physicist Enrico Fermi asked a simple question.

There are hundreds of billions of stars in our Milky Way galaxy, and – presumed at the time – a significant percentage have Earth-like habitable planets orbiting them. The galaxy is billions of years old, and the odds are high that there should be other technological civilisations out there. But we see no convincing sign of them.

So, where is everybody?

This question is now know as the Fermi Paradox.

In the last couple of years, I’ve been seeing another paradox. Many people claim that working software can now be produced for pennies on the pound, in a fraction of the time that it takes humans. Some go so far as to claim that we’re in the age of commoditised software, throwaway software, and hail the end of the software industry as we know it.

Why buy a CRM solution or a ERM system when “AI” can generate one for you in hours or even minutes? Why sign up for a SaaS platform when Cursor can spit one out just as good in the blink of an eye?

But when we look beyond the noise – beyond these sensational flying saucer reports – we see nothing of the sort. No AI-generated Spotify or Salesforce or SAP. No LLM-generated games bothering the charts. No noticeable uptick in new products being added to the app stores.

So, where is everybody?