The cost of turning written business logic into code has dropped to zero. Or, at best, near-zero. The cost of integrating services and libraries, the plumbing of the code world, has dropped to zero.…
The cost of turning written business logic into code has dropped to zero. Or, at best, near-zero.
The cost of integrating services and libraries, the plumbing of the code world, has dropped to zero. Or, at best, near-zero.
The cost of building efficient, reliable, secure, end-to-end systems is starting to drop, but slowly.
Where does that leave those of us who have built careers in technology? Our road diverges. Not into the undergrowth of a wood, but into a dense fog. The future is harder to see than ever. But lets peer forward and see as best we can.
On the first road we can see this as the end to a craft we have loved. The slow end of programming as an economic discipline, as weaving, ploughing, and coopering went before. It is reasonable and rational to feel a sense of loss, and a sense of uncertainty. With the loss of the craft comes the loss of the economic moment where that craft was valued beyond nearly any other. Perhaps any other in history. It is irrational to feel denial. You are here.
On the second road we can see this moment as the beginning of something new. With new tools comes greater opportunity than ever. Greater economic opportunity for those who value that. Greater technical opportunity for those who value that. The most powerful set of new tools since the dawn of computing itself. With these tools come risk, and with risk comes opportunity. With these tools come new industries, new fields of research, and new careers. All bring opportunity.
The First Road
Back at university, I knew this guy. Mostly retired. An absolute wizz at circuit design and analog electronics. Like nobody I’ve encountered since. In the late 1960s, him and some buddies started a hardware company. They’d seen digital electronics coming, the 74 series had just launched. They didn’t like it. No class. No beauty. Unreliable and full of problems. So they started this company betting that serious customers wouldn’t accept the downsides of digital logic, and analog was the way of the future for real automation. Statistically, measured by the ratio of transistors in digital and analog circuits in the year 2026, it’s unlikely anybody has ever been more wrong. Wrong by ten or more orders of magnitude.
He made a small fortune along this path. Not a large one, but enough to keep his children comfortable. The first road will surely have similar winners. The stubborn who stick to the old ways, and hustle to squeeze out the remaining economic value. That value will remain, because the world always changes slower than we would like.
But those that succeed along this road will increasingly be those that acknowledge what they’re doing, and why they’re doing it. Picking up the parts of an old world, now gone, but intentionally.
There will still be joy in programming. Just as there’s joy in joinery, knitting, and hiking. You’re not wrong to love programming. I love it too. You’re not wrong to feel a deep sense of loss. I feel it too.
The Second Road
What careers lie on the second road? Perhaps surprisingly, this seems harder to predict. My guess is that there are fortunes to be made exploiting the new technology, building faster, and out-competing a valuable incumbent. There are decades of great companies to build following that recipe. There are great careers in technology and science to be made applying this new technology to old problems, bringing new tools into tricky places, and solving the previously unsolvable. There are both fortunes and careers to be made in solving the problems this new technology introduces, allowing everybody else to exploit it to its maximum potential.
In other words, my best prediction is that the next two decades look like the last four. Hardly a prediction worthy of an oracle.
Today, it seems like the biggest opportunities will be in the third of my opening statements. Building systems remains hard. Can I assume you’re familiar with Amdahl’s Law? That’s what’s going on: a massive speed up on a portion of the problem, but as that portion speeds up it becomes less and less of a contributor to the overall speedup. Lowering the costs of the rest of the problem is work that remains to be done. It’s going to take a long time, because the real world is fully of sticky problems, surprising feedback loops, human stubbornness, and the occasional adversary.
There’s also going to be great value in ideas. Integration and translation are solved problems. Simple analysis, and small scale synthesis are too. But new ideas, real transformative new ideas, remain hard to come by. And, as the lever gets longer, more and more valuable.
Software’s first act is over. The second act won’t go like anybody expects, but I can bet that it’ll be more interesting, more economically valuable, and more mentally stimulating than we can imagine right now.
I can’t wait to be part of it.
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Comments
> The cost of turning written business logic into code has dropped to zero
Didn’t realize this was science fiction.
By geetee 2026-02-0722:47 I appreciate the author making that the first sentence.
By AstroBen 2026-02-0723:19 I swear all of these are coming from the prompt "hey chatgpt rewrite this article that got a lot of views"
I've seen non-technical people vibe code with agents. They're capable of producing janky, very basic CRUD apps. Code cost definitely ain't zero
By KronisLV 2026-02-0812:05 > Didn’t realize this was science fiction.
Compared to my salary, the current cost of the models and tokens to do the work I normally would, is around 10%-25% of it.
Obviously, you still need someone to prevent the models from going insane and messing everything up, but in my experience (webdev projects, DevOps stuff, local software, well known domains), it is very much a force multiplier, as long as you acknowledge that you really need tests and various prebuild scripts.
So I predict one of two things happening:
Either way, it's an interesting direction - instead of ever becoming "proper" engineering (outside of RFCs and foundational stuff), we went from React/Vue/Angular/Svelte/Express.js/Laravel/Django/Rails/ASP.NET/Spring wild west and frameworks of the day (never being able to nail down what "good practices" are and stick to them for decades, but chasing the new thing forevermore), to even closer to producing non-deterministic slop, except that the slop kinda sorta works. Wild times.A) de-valuation of software development work in well-explored domains (and perhaps some changes in regards to outsourcing, as long as cultural and communication differences can be compensated for); with the implications for those learning programming now B) the squeeze coming in the other direction, making inference 3-5x more expensive, though maybe not with how every big org out there is trying to be a loss leaderBy bopbopbop7 2026-02-0723:492 reply I think the author forgot that code has to compile and be useful.
And how much is technical debt worth?
What coding agent are you using where the code doesn't even compile!?
By bopbopbop7 2026-02-080:12 The one that cursor used to build their famous browser.
By whynotminot 2026-02-080:181 reply [flagged]
By bopbopbop7 2026-02-080:221 reply AI misinformation? Please do provide some examples.
Your whole history is AI psychosis btw, seek help.
By whynotminot 2026-02-080:241 reply > AI misinformation? Please do provide some examples.
Like saying they can't generate compiling code in this very thread?
By bopbopbop7 2026-02-080:281 reply Go look at the 40k failing CI/CD runs on the famous cursor browser.
By whynotminot 2026-02-080:322 reply Ah, it couldn't generate a 100% complete working browser from scratch in a week. I guess the technology is cooked.
By bopbopbop7 2026-02-083:18 Ah, so no longer misinformation?
By canadiantim 2026-02-0723:58 Depends if I can bundle the technical debt, get a triple AAA rating on it and then sell it
By heliumtera 2026-02-0723:174 reply But it is true, the cost is effectively zero. There will be, for a long time, free models available and any one of them will give you code back, always!
They never refuse. Worst case scenario the good models ask for clarification.
The cost for producing code is zero and code producers are in a really bad spot.
I beg to differ. Let's say you're right. Code producers should turn to agriculture and let their managers and product owners prompt AI to produce code. How about code maintainers? Ever heard the mantra "You build it, you run it"? Lets say that AI can build it. Can it run it though? All alone, safely, securely and reliably? No. It can't. We can keep dreaming though, and when will AI code production services turn profitable? Is there a single one which turned profitable?
By eddyg 2026-02-0815:00 There are already agents doing this in SRE roles.
Agents are monitoring metrics and logs. A bug is introduced into the system. Error rates go up and the agents notify diagnostic agents. These agents look at recent commits and figure out the problem. They instruct another agent about how to fix the issue and deploy the change. The problem is fixed before an engineer even has time to start looking at logs.
If you aren’t seeing this, you’re not keeping up with what others are already doing. It’s not just people vibe coding ToDo apps.
By heliumtera 2026-02-0723:362 reply Calm down buddy, maybe you're confusing code producers with something else. It's 2026 we don't bother with maintenance no more, we /new to keep context clean and start over. Just don't forget to comment - never delete - old code. Always keep dead code around to please shareholders, line numbers up always. We produce code, that is the main thing, never forget.
One could argue we could achieve the same goals by appending \n to a file in a loop, but this is inefficient nowadays with generous token offerings (but could change in the future than I highly suggest just outputting \n to a file an call it productivity increase)
I didn't understand your point about product owners. Who the fuck would ever need one when code produces itself?
By dullcrisp 2026-02-080:13 Right but memory is expensive now so where do I keep all of this new code that I’ve produced??
By ThrowawayR2 2026-02-080:20 Good grief, it's like watching people consuming Soylent meal substitute shakes and proclaiming that chefs and cooking are obsolete.
By bopbopbop7 2026-02-0723:251 reply Because who cares about correct and compilable code, any code will do!
By heliumtera 2026-02-0723:36 Exactly!
> The cost for producing code is zero
Zero as long as your time is worth nothing, and bad code and security issues cost you nothing maybe.
"Getting code" has always been dead simple and cheap. Getting actually good code that works and doesn't turn into a problem for you down the road is the expensive part
> Zero as long as your time is worth nothing
i can't remember who said it but a long time ago i remember reading "Linux is free if your time is worthless". Now we all use Linux one way or the other.
By autoexec 2026-02-0723:40 That's still very much true, but at least in the case of Linux the cost is getting lower and lower all the time. The time investment for many has reached about the same as the cost needed for Windows and as a result we see more and more people using linux. At this point it's a perfectly viable gaming platform!
Maybe one day LLMs will eventually make good code at a low cost, and that will allow non-programmers to write programs with few problems but the cost will never be zero, and I think we're a long long way from making human programers obsolete.
All of the intelligence that LLMs mimic came directly from the work of human minds which got fed into them, but what LLMs output is a lossy conversion filled with error and hallucination.
My guess is that the LLMs producing code will improve for a short time, but as they start to slurp up more and more of their own slop they'll start performing worse.
I am thinking about this a lot right now. Pretty existential stuff.
I think builders are gonna be fine. The type of programmer were people would put up with just because they could really go in their cave for a few days and come out with a bug fix that nobody else on the team could figure out is going to have a hard time.
Interestingly AI coding is really good at that sort of thing and less good at fully grasping user requirements or big picture systems. Basically things that we had to sit in meetings a lot for.
By ericpauley 2026-02-0723:08 This has been my experience too. That insane race condition inside the language runtime that is completely inscrutable? Claude one-shots it. Ask it to work on that same logic to add features and it will happily introduce race conditions that are obvious to an engineer but a local test will never uncover.
By pointlessone 2026-02-088:49 I’m not convinced. That sort of thing usually depends on some very specific arcana or weird interaction between systems that is not in the code. It usually requires either external knowledge or deep investigation and compilation of evidence from multiple sources. I haven’t seen AI do that much.
Look at recent examples of browsers and matrix servers. AI can’t even follow extremely detailed specs with extensive test suites.
If anything, nice and friendly but mediocre devs are in more immediate danger than rough but extremely competent devs.
But we’ve seen C-suits losing institutional knowledge at a drop of a hat for decades so who knows? Maybe knowledge and skill are not that valued.
By wiseowise 2026-02-0723:21 > The type of programmer were people would put up with just because they could really go in their cave for a few days and come out with a bug fix that nobody else on the team could figure out is going to have a hard time.
Amen. It was a good time while it lasted.
By oytis 2026-02-0723:16 All software engineers become pretty much the same in this world though. Anyone can sit in the meetings.
By falloutx 2026-02-0723:24 meetings hardly reach anywhere. most of the details are eventually figured out by developers when interacting with the code. If all ideas from PMs are implemented in a software, it would eventually turn into bloatware before even reaching MVP stage.
By diob 2026-02-080:41 Not really, in my experience you still have to be good at solving problems to use it effectively. Claude (and other AI) can help folks find a "fix", but a lot of times it's a band-aid if the user doesn't understand how to debug / solve things themselves.
So the type of programmers you're talking about, who could solve complex problems, are actually just enhanced by it.
By ratrace 2026-02-0817:15 > The type of programmer were people would put up with just because they could really go in their cave for a few days and come out with a bug fix that nobody else on the team could figure out is going to have a hard time.
This is the exact type of programmer that isn't going to have any issues - ones who actually know what they're doing and aren't just going to vibecode react slop.
With all due respect to the author, this is a lot of words for not much substance. Rehashing the same thoughts everyone already thinks but not being bold enough to make a concrete prediction.
This is the time for bold predictions, you’ve just told us we’re in a crucible moment yet you end the article passively….
By vagab0nd 2026-02-084:11 I have a theory: I think the recent advance in coding agent has shocked everyone. It's something of such unheard-of novelty that everyone thinks they've discovered something profound. Naturally, they all think they are the only ones in on it and feel the need to share. But in reality, it's already public knowledge, so they add no value. I've been in this trap many times in the last couple years.
Predictions
- Small companies using AI are going to kick the sh*t out of large companies that are slow to adapt.
- LLMs will penetrate more areas of our lives. Closer to the STTNG computer. They will be agents in the real life sense and possibly in the physical world as well (robots).
- ASICs will eat nVidia's lunch.
- We will see an explosion of software and we will also see more jobs for people who are able to maintain all this software (using AI tools). There is going to be a lot more custom software for very specific purposes.
> Small companies using AI are going to kick the sh*t out of large companies that are slow to adapt.
Big companies are sales machines and their products have been terrible for ages. Microsoft enjoys the top spot in software sales only due to their sales staff pushing impossible deals every year.
It's true the big company products have been terrible but they also enjoyed a moat that made it harder for competitors to enter.
With this moat reduced I think you'll find this approach doesn't work any more. The smaller companies will also hire the good sales people away.
History suggests otherwise, and there's nothing particularly special about this moment.
Microsoft survived (and even, for a little while, dominated) after missing the web. Netscape didn't eat its lunch.
Then Google broke out on a completely different front.
Now there's billions of dollars of investment in "AI", hoping to break out like the next Google... while competing directly with Google.
(This is why we should be more ambitious about constraining large companies and billionaires.)
Well, I made my predictions. Let's come back in a few years.
Netscape didn't attack Microsoft's business software, operating systems or other pieces of their offerings.
Google also didn't seriously attack Microsoft's business.
And neither had the capability to build large software very fast.
Google is both a software company and an infrastructure company as is Microsoft today. Their software is going to become more of a commodity but their data centers still have value (even perhaps more value since all this new software needs a place to run). It's true that if you're in the business of hosting software and selling SaaS you have an advantage over a competitor who does not host their own software.
By jdub 2026-02-087:42 > Netscape didn't attack Microsoft's business software, operating systems or other pieces of their offerings.
That's not how it was interpreted at the time: Netscape threatened to route around the desktop operating system (Win32) to deliver applications via the browser. "Over the top" as they say in television land.
Netscape didn't succeed, but that's precisely what happened (along with the separate incursion of mobile platforms, spearheaded by Apple... followed quickly by Google, who realised they had to follow suit very quickly).
> And neither had the capability to build large software very fast.
Internet Explorer. Android. Gemini.
By beej71 2026-02-0821:58 I also predict an explosion of work for qualified devs. And I predict there will be an undersupply of them.
By jdjdndbdhsjsb 2026-02-0722:444 reply Here is my bold prediction: 2026 is the year where companies start the lay offs.
2026 is the year where we all realise that we can be our own company and build the stuff in our dreams rather than the mundane crap we do at work.
Honestly I am optimistic about computing in general. Llms will open things up for novices and experts alike. We can move into I the fields where we can use our brain power... But all we need is enough memory and compute to control our destiny....
I don't know, its a bit of a hellscape in tech right now as thousands of people with deep domain knowledge and people knowledge and business knowledge (ie experienced engineers managers and product owners), were laid off by C Suites desperate to keep the AI funded mandates going
Do you know how hard it to make a successful company or even make money? Its like saying any actor can goto hollywood and be a star
VCs wont fund everyone
Nobody is sure of anything
By jdjdndbdhsjsb 2026-02-0723:301 reply Yes it is. But I am an optimist for human nature. I personally believe smaller companies doing different things is the future... Scaling as they need. It is a hellscape but people can and will adapt.
> Do you know how hard it to make a successful company or even make money?
Yes I have failed to do it before. I get this.
> VCs wont fund everyone
And? Do you need VCs? Economics mean that scale matters but what if we don't need it. What if we can make efficient startups with our own funding??
I’d like to say its possible
But heres the reality from me- I’m in my 50s and I don't have it in me to grind at the level of 20 year olds to achieve some level of security in an untried business model - and this is someone who has launched 2 AI startups in the past 2 years
In one we got VC funding but I left after setting up their agent platform and tons of AI assisted coding only to not meet impossible deadlines and over-promised AI value to enterprise customers - I was literally working 20 hr days at stretch for 170k salary competing and half benefits against 25 year olds out of stamford with no lives- far lower than the 250+ with stock and benefits I got in my EM role at a big company which now evaporated - I was edged out of that startup role for not delivering “on time”
My second AI startup I cofounded with friends and trusted colleagues its bootstrapped (all of us are over 40) - so we have more experience and better deadlines now but its up to the business gods on how well it will do- crossing my fingers
But its a lot of pressure for sure and I currently have no health insurance and my wife was laid off in December and we lost her benefits
So I wouldn’t call myself optimistic in the end stage capitalistic hellwhole that is modern “middle class” America
I hope a better work model can be found - but having some any salary and medical benefit security would be nice
I went to an AI meetup last week and it was filled with gray hairs - i could sense the desperation as many people I met told me they were laid off recently and trying to dive in
Ironically looking at them it reminded me of those interviews they used to do in Appalachia or something when a town was out of work and advisors came in and said “learn to code instead of mining” (ok I may be exaggerating somewhat but I even know a ex Microsoft manager who had to resort to a go-fundme to keep his family afloat)
By AIorNot 2026-02-0820:37 update: this reddit thread is somewhat amusing satirical post on this topic
https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1qzj9ve/67_no_f...
>Here is my bold prediction: 2026 is the year where companies start the lay offs.
Start? Excuse moi
By jdjdndbdhsjsb 2026-02-0723:311 reply Yeah fair... But now it is different I.e. they won't regret it
By layer8 2026-02-080:46 What gives you the idea that they regretted it?
By falloutx 2026-02-0723:27 Except it started in 2023, we are in the middle of layoff waves.
By jdjdndbdhsjsb 2026-02-0723:202 reply I'm human?
By jdjdndbdhsjsb 2026-02-0723:40 Oytis: I can't reply to you directly, but yes I am sure I am human.
Not sure how to prove it to you.
By oytis 2026-02-0723:31 Are you sure?
