For most of the history of software development, developers were more closely related to machine shops than anything else.
If you wanted software, you needed specialists with years of training and extensive knowledge. Building *good* software was hard, so the ability to build it was a valuable skill.
We're all seeing firsthand that that's changed.
AI is rapidly reducing the cost of software development. What once required a team of engineers can now be built by a single person with a few AI tools and a small budget for tokens.
As a result, developers are starting to look less like machine shops and more like home builders.
Almost anyone can build a house. Given a blueprint and access to the right tools and subcontractors, the actual construction is no longer the hard part. But a better question to ask might be whether they can build a good one.
What separates home builders from one another isn't necessarily the ability to swing a hammer. It's everything surrounding the construction process:
- Attracting customers
- Relationships
- Design
- Taste
- Understanding the customer's needs
- Reliability
- Project management
- Reputation
Two builders can start with the same materials and produce completely different outcomes. Software is heading in the same direction, if not already there, and you'll see this most at software companies themselves.
For decades, software companies competed largely on engineering capability. If you could hire better engineers, you could build things your competitors couldn't. That was the moat. Today, many competitors can build roughly the same product. As a result, distribution, customer relationships, support, brand, and product judgment become increasingly important. The same list that separates home builders — reputation, relationships, taste, customer acquisition, trust — is increasingly what separates software companies too.
The ability to write usable code is becoming less scarce. More people than ever can turn an idea into a working product.
But working products are not the same as good products!
As AI lowers the barrier to software development, the skills that matter most are the ones surrounding the build: understanding customer needs, choosing the right features, making good tradeoffs, and creating products people actually need and enjoy using.
Inside these companies, developers are having to adapt. Instead of laying every brick themselves, they're coordinating teams of subcontractors: LLMs, coding agents, APIs, 3rd party integrations, and open-source libraries. The job increasingly becomes deciding what should be built, reviewing the work, and making sure all the pieces fit together. But that's a shift happening within companies whose competitive edge is now moving elsewhere.
There's been a lot of discourse on this lately and the common question seems to be "can anyone build software" (they can), but the more interesting question is what exactly will happen once everyone can.
What does this mean for software companies?
So now that just about everyone can build software, what actually differentiates a software business? Just like in construction, there are lots of things:
- Customer acquisition and distribution
- Trust and reputation
- Relationships with customers and partners
- Brand and positioning
- Product judgment and taste
- Support and reliability
Remember what I said about what separates home builders? All of those apply too.
None of this means engineering suddenly stops mattering.
Yes, AI makes it easier to build software, but it doesn't magically make everyone capable of building Stripe, AWS, Figma, or PostHog. The engineering challenges involved in building and operating systems at that scale remain out of reach to vibe coders.
For decades, software companies won because they could build things that others couldn't. You can still gain an edge and win by knowing what to build in the first place, by being the best partner to build it with, and by knowing how to go about the process in the right way.
To be clear, software development is far from valueless. The value is simply shifting.
The value used to come from being able to build. Increasingly, it comes from knowing what to build, how to build it, and who to build it for.
When building becomes easy, construction stops being the differentiator.