AI Made Code Cheap. The Bottleneck Is Now Understanding Systems.

De. Software used to be expensive to produce. Developers were constrained by how fast they could write code, which meant teams had to be deliberate about what they built. Every feature was an investment. That constraint is eroding quickly. AI tools can now generate large amounts of working software from relatively small prompts. Cursor scaffolds full modules from a description. Claude Code produces working CLIs in minutes. Copilot fills in entire implementations as you type. One prompt can produce hundreds of lines of code - complete API handlers, even full prototypes.