Democratizing software: when building is as cheap as describing
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For most of computing history, the hard part of software was building it. That is quietly ceasing to be true.
When describing a system in plain language can produce a working first version, the bottleneck moves — from who can build to who knows what is worth building.
The falling cost of a first version
A prototype that once took a funded team a quarter can now take one person a weekend. That does not make software trivial — it makes starting trivial, which is a different and more powerful thing.
Distribution is the new moat
When anyone can build the first version, the first version is no longer the advantage. Trust, distribution and the taste to know what to leave out become the things that are actually scarce.
Craft still matters
Cheap to start is not the same as good. The last ten percent — reliability, accessibility, the details that make a product feel considered — is still slow, still human, and still where reputations are made.
Lowering the cost of building doesn't lower the bar for what is worth shipping. If anything, it raises it.
