For most of the history of software development, developers were closer to machine shops than anything else.
If you wanted software, you needed specialists with years of experience. Building good software was hard, so the ability to build it was valuable.
That's changed, and we're all watching it happen in real time.
AI is dropping the cost of software development fast. What used to take a team of engineers can now get built by one person with a few AI tools and a small budget for tokens.
So developers are starting to look less like machine shops and more like home builders.
Almost anyone can build a house. Give them a blueprint, the right tools, some subcontractors - the construction itself isn't really the hard part anymore. Whether they can build a good one is a different story.
What separates home builders usually isn't who swings a hammer better. It's the stuff around the build: attracting customers, relationships, design, taste, understanding what the customer actually needs, reliability, project management, reputation.
Two builders can start with the same materials and end up with totally different houses. Software is heading the same way - if it isn't already there - and you'll notice it most at software companies themselves.
For a long time, software companies competed mostly on engineering. Hire better engineers, build things your competitors couldn't. That was the moat.
Today a lot of competitors can ship roughly the same product. So distribution, customer relationships, support, brand, and product judgment matter more. Same stuff that separates home builders, basically - reputation, relationships, taste, getting customers, trust.
Writing usable code is getting less scarce. More people than ever can turn an idea into something that runs.
A working product and a good product are still very different things.
As AI makes it easier to build, the skills that matter more are the ones around the build: figuring out what customers need, picking the right features, making decent tradeoffs, and shipping something people actually want to use.
Inside companies, developers are adapting too. Instead of laying every brick themselves, they're coordinating subcontractors - LLMs, coding agents, APIs, third-party integrations, open-source libraries. More of the job is deciding what should get built, reviewing the work, and making sure the pieces fit. That shift is happening inside companies whose competitive edge is already moving elsewhere.
There's been a lot of discourse on this. The usual question is whether anyone can build software now (yes). The more interesting one is what happens once everyone can.
What does this mean for software companies?
Once just about everyone can build software, what actually sets a software business apart?
A lot of the same things that set home builders apart: customer acquisition, distribution, trust, reputation, relationships, brand, product judgment, support. Engineering still matters - just not as the only thing that does.
AI makes software easier to build. It doesn't magically make everyone capable of building Stripe, AWS, Figma, or PostHog. The hard parts of running systems at that scale are still out of reach for vibe coders.
For decades, software companies won because they could build things others couldn't.
You can still win. You just win differently now - by knowing what to build, being a good partner to build it with, and going about the process in a way that doesn't fall apart.
Software development isn't worthless. The value is shifting. It used to come from being able to build. More and more it comes from knowing what to build, how to build it, and who you're building it for.
When building gets easy, construction stops being the differentiator.