AS LABOR COSTS TEND TOWARDS ZERO:
The A.I. Disruption Is Actually Here, and It’s Not Terrible (Paul Ford, 2/16/26, NY Times)
November was, for me and many others in tech, a great surprise. Before, A.I. coding tools were often useful, but halting and clumsy. Now, the bot can run for a full hour and make whole, designed websites and apps that may be flawed, but credible. I spent an entire session of therapy talking about it.
The tech industry is a global culture — an identity based on craft and skill. Software development has been a solid middle-class job for a long time. But that may be slipping away. What might the future look like if 100 million, or a billion, people can make any software they desire? Could this be a moment of unparalleled growth and opportunity as people gain access to tech industry power for themselves?
According to the market, the answer is no. Recently, software stocks — Monday.com, Salesforce, Adobe and many others — plummeted all at once; the Nasdaq 100 lost half a trillion dollars in two days. Legal software company stocks slumped recently because Anthropic released tools to automate some legal work. Financial services firms and real estate services — the market keeps devaluing them because traders expect there to be less need for humans at desks in an A.I.-automated future. Why will anyone need all that legacy software when A.I. can code anything up for you in two shakes of a robotic lamb’s tail?
Personally this all feels premature, but markets aren’t subtle thinkers. And I get it. When you watch a large language model slice through some horrible, expensive problem — like migrating data from an old platform to a modern one — you feel the earth shifting. I was the chief executive of a software services firm, which made me a professional software cost estimator. When I rebooted my messy personal website a few weeks ago, I realized: I would have paid $25,000 for someone else to do this. When a friend asked me to convert a large, thorny data set, I downloaded it, cleaned it up and made it pretty and easy to explore. In the past I would have charged $350,000.
The revolution is always ten years away… until you realize it already happened.