I have to admit: I love it.
I love that almost anyone can now build whatever they want. I love that this will create a vastly greater variety of tools and products, and hopefully fewer monopolies. Things that previously required funding, technical co-founders, or an entire development team can increasingly be made by one person.
But there is another reason I welcome it.
I think much of our industry has been overpaid.
For years, the ability to make software was artificially scarce. Not necessarily because the work was exceptionally valuable, but because relatively few people knew how to do it. Companies paid enormous salaries for people to move rectangles around a screen, connect one database to another, and rebuild slightly different versions of products that already existed.
I include myself in this.
Most of us sit in front of computers all day and produce things that only exist inside other computers. That does not mean the work is meaningless. But it is worth asking how much actual value we create – not shareholder value, but value for other humans.
AI is beginning to separate the value of an outcome from the effort previously required to produce it.
A feature that once took a team three months may soon take one person three hours. The feature has not necessarily become less useful. But the labour behind it has become less scarce, and therefore less valuable.
That will be painful for a lot of people. Entire careers have been built around being able to do something that other people could not. When everyone can do it—or when a machine can do most of it—the status and compensation attached to that skill will inevitably decline.
Development will not disappear. But development as pure execution is becoming cheaper.
The valuable part is moving elsewhere: deciding what should exist, understanding people, taking responsibility for an outcome, having taste, earning trust, and caring enough to make something genuinely good.
And I think this devaluation will increase the value of things that cannot be generated as easily.
Hospitality, for example.
Today, you can get a coffee from a machine for one euro. Or you can go somewhere where a barista welcomes you, remembers what you ordered last time, cares about the beans, and has spent years becoming good at what they do. You pay four euros, not because the liquid is four times more functional, but because the experience contains attention, skill, atmosphere, and another human being.
The machine does not destroy the café. It makes the distinction clearer.
The same may happen everywhere.
You will be able to generate an app instantly, but you may pay more for someone who truly understands your business and follows the same values. You will be able to produce endless images, but you may value the photograph taken by someone who was actually there. You will be able to ask an AI for advice, but still seek out a person who knows you and is willing to stand behind what they say.
Cheap abundance makes deliberate human effort more visible.
Perhaps we have spent the last few decades overvaluing work simply because it involved complicated tools. And perhaps we will now begin valuing work for different reasons: because it requires presence, judgment, courage, patience, or care.
At the end of the day, many of us are just sitting in front of a screen.
Once that is no longer a particularly rare ability, we may have to become useful in more human ways.