Precious metals are valuable partly because they're difficult to extract from the ground. The same is true for many other things. Scarcity has always been a major factor in determining the value of something.
Software has always been valuable because writing software has been a tedious and highly specialized endeavor. But with the birth of AI, the economics of producing software are changing.
As you start working with AI, it becomes obvious that software is starting to look more like Lego. You can assemble pieces, describe what you want, and have AI build things that previously required significant amounts of specialized engineering work.
There's always an argument about quality, security vulnerabilities, maintainability, and architecture. Those things still matter, but they're becoming a different kind of value proposition.
The bigger change is that a software engineer can now produce code 10 times, if not more, than they could by writing it manually.
That changes our perception of software.
I remember in the late 1990s and early 2000s, software development was increasingly outsourced to places like India because companies were looking for a cheaper way to produce code.
Now, we're outsourcing the coding itself to AI.
And that raises a much bigger question:
If software is no longer scarce, what makes software valuable?
