Whether “code is free” or not, it’s clear that code is becoming cheaper, and problems that used to be complex enough to require programming, but not wide enough to warrant the cost are suddenly viable for everyone to take on.

We used to have a moat because we had software; because we had features we had already built that existed and functioned.

It’s never been more critical to have clarity in product thinking—to understand what people actually need, and to be decisive about delivering those things. If code is free, are features free? Is that the worlds simplest recipe for feature bloat? My least favorite software is the one that cannot tell me how it wants to be used.

I think the same is also true for code. Sure, the agents can blather out hundreds of lines a minute, and sure they might “adhere to best practices and maintain code coverage” if your CLAUDE.md file says to. But when the code becomes bloated and convoluted, when the interfaces become unwieldy, when the code begs for thoughtful refactoring, who will be there to guide the hand that types? Who has the clarity of mind and the backing theory to understand why the code is hard to reason about and hard to test?

Time to redouble our efforts to make sure we understand which problems are actually worth solving.