“Anyone Can Code Now” - Netlify CEO Talks AI Agents

**Matt Biilmann** (0:00)
In the past, before all of this AI, when people asked what to do to be a good developer, I said, like, just have a really high tolerance for frustration.

**Martin Casado** (0:09)
That's about right. For me to understand Next or React or some weird CLI, there's nothing fundamental. So it really is just wasted knowledge.

**Matt Biilmann** (0:21)
What defined a developer at its core used to be being able to write code and understand programming languages. And suddenly, that part of being a developer is getting way less important. Software development will just be a skill. Just like with writing, there's still professional writers, but like all of us also have to know how to write as part of our job. Two years ago, our addressable audience was essentially 17 million professional JavaScript developers. And suddenly, computers can write code. An addressable audience for a tool like ours, that's everybody that can use spreadsheets today, which is more like 3 billion people. A year ago, we were sitting at around 3,000 signups a day. Today, we're sitting at around 16,000 a day. We're starting to see those kind of patterns where is this an agent accessing or is it a human? There's also just way more people having fun building crazy stuff. People building like really cool WebGL games and so on that they could never manage to build before. Browsers will evolve really dramatically from this. That originally concept of a user agent on the Web is getting real. You see people have history with their chat tbt or cloud, and they really have a preference. They don't want to go to the bank's AI and talk to that. They just want to interact in that way.

**Erik Torenberg** (1:42)
The Web as we know it is about to become unrecognizable, not because of new protocol or framework, but because of who's building it. For the first time in history, the barrier between I have an idea and I shift working software is collapsing. Netlify just watched their daily signups jump from 3,000 to 16,000. The twist? Most of these new users aren't developers. They're marketers, designers, product managers, people who six months ago couldn't write a line of code. Matt Biilmann saw this coming. He coined the term agent experience, the idea that AI agents are now a core user of every product you build. But here's where it gets interesting. While others are building tools that say, we'll be your developer, Matt's making a different bet. He believes we're not replacing developers, we're creating billions of new ones. This raises an uncomfortable question. If anyone can build software, what actually makes you a developer anymore? The answer might surprise you and has nothing to do with code. Today, Matt sits down with a16z general partner, Martin Casado, to cover why CEOs are suddenly submitting pull requests again, why the dead web theory is backwards and what happens when your son's AI friend needs to open a bank account.

**Martin Casado** (2:57)
Matt, thanks for joining. It's good to see you. So this is Matt Biilmann, the CEO, founder of Netlify, also creator of the Jamstack.
Very well known to be an architect of the web and someone that tracks the trends. And you were with us a couple months ago, and we were discussing AX and what that means. And now, the space is moving so quickly, we're a few months on. And so the point of this is going to be to talk about what we've learned in the last couple of months. But maybe before that, maybe you can describe what AX is.

**Matt Biilmann** (3:32)
Yeah.

**Martin Casado** (3:33)
And then we'll just kind of get into like, kind of what we're learning.

**Matt Biilmann** (3:36)
Yeah, I wrote an article about the first article about AX in, back in January, which is like, feels like 10 years ago in AI time now.
As the term for agent experience and sort of really thinking about the evolution from user experience as like the term that like really could set a product apart from other products, not just based on a checklist of features, but based on like the experience of like everything around it. And then our first decade at Netlify of really centering around developer experience that's typically been a way to set platforms aside from other platforms, right? Like by making like lower friction for developers to actually build on them and extend them and use them and so on. Towards this idea that we suddenly, all of us that build product have this new persona using the product that's an agent driven by AI. And that also sort of actually have an experience of the product, right? Like whatever that means, right? Like doesn't necessarily mean that there's like some soul behind it or something, right? But it obviously has some, like it's like actually attempting to figure out how to do stuff with our product in an autonomous way, right? Like so suddenly the documentation about our product, the onboarding experience of our product is no longer just for like a person. It's also for a person asking an agent to do stuff, right? Like, and that, that was what I sort of described in this article on, on agent experience is something that suddenly for us at Netlify became like our product Northstar and that I proposed at the time should be pretty important for anybody building products in the world today.