We now live in a world where code is cheap. The cost to ship something is approaching zero and the barrier to entry has dropped through the floor. That is a good thing. More people can create now than at any point I can remember, and a lot of them are people who always had something to build but never had the means to build it.
Here is the catch though. These tools only multiply what you already have. They do not hand you taste. They do not hand you judgement. They take whatever you bring and they scale it.
The means caught up to the intent
Think about the petrolhead who always wanted to do software mods on his car but hit a wall the moment it required actual code. For years his only options were to outsource it or buy a solution off the shelf. Now he can prompt his way to a working version of the thing he could already picture in his head.
Same story for the designer with no coding experience but a very precise idea of what they want. The intent was always there. The gap was execution. That gap is closing fast.
This is the part I find genuinely exciting. The bottleneck used to be the means. For a lot of people the bottleneck was never the idea, it was the translation of the idea into something real.
The flood? It's fine
So we get the rise of personal software, and we get a lot of the same piece of software showing up everywhere. The same todo app, the same dashboard, the same wrapper. That was always going to happen once the cost of making one approached zero, and honestly it is fine. Abundance looks like noise before it looks like anything else.
Because as with everything, the cream rises to the top.
Quality still requires craft
This is the thing I keep coming back to. The flood does not change what good actually is. Quality still requires craft, and craft is not something you can prompt into existence.
Craft comes from experience. It comes from taste. It comes from depth. It is the accumulated sense of why one solution feels right and another feels off, even when both technically work. You build that over time, through repetition, through getting it wrong, through caring about the difference when nobody asked you to.
To make something genuinely worthwhile, something worthy of a bit of awe, there is no escaping that. There never was. The only thing that changed is the time it takes to write the code. The writing got cheap. The knowing did not.
The problem moved, it did not disappear
The problem is no longer code execution. That is mostly handled now, and it will only get more handled.
But there is a meta layer to this worth naming. Beautiful code still requires knowledge, smartness, depth, and understanding. The model can produce the lines, but knowing whether those lines are right, whether the structure will hold, whether you are solving the actual problem or a decorative version of it, that is still on you. The judgement did not get automated. It got more important, because now it is the scarce thing.
So craft can look like a lot of things. Depth. Experience. Background. Fortitude. Ambition. The willingness to sit with a hard problem long after the easy version stopped being good enough.
Where I have landed
The goal, as I see it, is simple. Have craft. Enjoy the work. Let AI do the grunt.
Push the tedious, repetitive, low-judgement work onto the tools that are good at it, and spend your own attention on the part that actually requires you. The taste. The decisions. The standard you hold the thing to before you let it out the door.
Code is cheap. Craft is not. Craft still wins.
And what if I told this was not exactly written by me? I gave a brain dump and "it" ran with it. Is this noise? Does this prove the point I just talked about? Have a think. Thanks for coming to my Ted talk. Peace!