In the very long term, software will become a commodity, as you mentioned. Process and workflow may move into JIT delivery for the need at hand, in theory the data layer will be comprehensive and clean and the days of clicking around a bunch of stuff to fulfill process needs will move into a lower latency activity like...talking to your agent.
I saw a quote today by Brian Eno(1995) that said: "So the question becomes not whether you can do it or not, because any drudge can do it if they're prepared to sit in front of the computer for a few days; the question then is: of all the things you can now do, which do you choose to do?" and it resonated with me a lot.
This is true when you had to work hard for those ideas. Now you have LLMs. It means more people can sling a lot more crap at walls with fewer barriers to entry.
- nearly every enterprise IT project is a failure anyway
- "can i do this for free?" savvy people write "thing i don't want to pay for github".
- ??? "stupid smelly nerds!" (https://www.reddit.com/r/github/comments/1at9br4)
okay, what was the actual obstacle? it's really simple: in order to use something FREE, you had to touch GITHUB, which meant GIT. and people hate git.
today, with LLMs:
- "can i do this for free?"
- LLM dutifully does the needful, using projects it finds and code it learned from github, and doing the prosaic tasks of launching them for you, whatever that means.
people are getting way up into their heads about what matters, psychosocial and management and whatever bs. chatgpt is FREE. it will fix your problems for FREE. people will put up with ANYTHING for FREE.
the real innovation is laundering all that inaccessible, pre-existing solution space into a format that doesn't require transiting git and giving it away for free.
don't believe me? all of the most profitable SaaS businesses in technology are the packaging, deployment and customization of pre-existing open source free software, whether it is linux, kvm, postgres, etc. they are factories to turn stuff that is inaccessible because it is in GIT, which SUCKS - that is the hard part for people to wrap their minds around, that GIT sucks - into websites you can pay for. now LLMs do that.
AI is like sugar. It tastes nice, gives you energy quickly - what's not to like? The gratification is immediate, and if "today is all that matters" it's brilliant.
The problem with sugar (and AI) is medium term. So sure, that junior dev whipped up the whole framework in ClaudeCode, and it's humming nicely. Junior dev gets credit, and after a couple years moves on somewhere else.
Then something changes. Windows. TLS. Code Signing, whatever. We need to update the program to the change. Just a small tweak. Junior Dev has gone (or is otherwise occupied) so we'll get new-Junior-dev to do it. Is he expected to do the change at the code level? Or at the prompt level? Will ClaudeCode in 2029 be able to maintain ClaudeCode Code from 2026? Or will it want to rewrite everything? Will new-junior-dev have the skillset to prompt as well as first-junior-dev? Was the code good enough that a dev could just "take it over"? Or was it "it works, let's use it" standard?
AI makes everyone look good in the short term. But it worries me for what happens in 5 years, 10 years, and so on. Sugar is great, but you can't live (long term) on sugar. Sometimes you need a proper meal plan.