Has the cost of building software just dropped 90%?

Code Is Cheap Now. Software Isn’t.

The barrier to entry for building software has collapsed. The barrier to building something that matters hasn’t moved an inch.

Note on 24th September 2026

The more time I spend working with coding agents, the more convinced I am that they make software engineering even harder. We can do amazing things with them, but unlocking …

Why I'm Betting Against AI Agents in 2025 (Despite Building Them)

I've built 12+ AI agent systems across development, DevOps, and data operations. Here's why the current hype around autonomous agents is mathematically impossible and what actually works in production.

Why AI hasn’t replaced software engineers, and won’t

Coding agents as normal technology

AI Code Is Producing a Quality Crisis Nobody Wants to Talk About

The productivity numbers look great. AI coding tools are everywhere.

Why Software Engineering Is Indispensable in the Age of Coding Agents

Can AI make Software Engineering (SE) -- the discipline -- obsolete? And can it make software engineers -- the professionals -- redundant? This paper argues that the rise of capable AI coding...

Code Is Cheap Now, And That Changes Everything | Pere Villega

AI coding agents have made code production nearly free. Drawing on insights from Kent Beck, Paul Ford, and Simon Willison, this post argues that the value has shifted from writing code to defining systems — contracts, invariants, SLAs, and verification.

scott belsky on Twitter / X

(2) DIY software will replace certain apps for consumers AND the enterprise. There has been much discussion of AI code reviews, GitHub co-pilot, and no-code app builders for the enterprise, but what are the implications of agent-assisted software development for consumers?…— scott belsky (@scottbelsky) December 29, 2024

Agents Done Right: A Framework Vision for 2026

Agents choke on context, loop on failures, and dump walls of code for review. It's time to rethink the architecture.

Coding Agents Are Easy, Actually - Kara's Nonsense

Software engineering is here to stay

The Gap Through Which We Praise the Machine

My current theory of agentic programming: people are amazing at adapting the tools they're given and totally underestimate the extent to which they do it, and the amount of skill we build doing that is an incidental consequence of how badly the tools are designed.

Maybe We Should Stop Investing in GUI-Centric Software Companies

Agents are a user base ten times larger than humans.

Adoption and Impact of Command-Line AI Coding Agents: A Study of Microsoft's Early 2026 Rollout of Claude Code and GitHub Copilot CLI

Organizations rolling out agentic command line tools like Anthropic's Claude Code and GitHub's Copilot CLI need to know who will try them, who will keep using them, and whether the tools produce enough output to justify their cost. At organizational scale, token spend can run into millions of dollars annually, so misreading adoption, retention, or impact can make a rollout expensive without changing engineering velocity. Studying tens of thousands of engineers at Microsoft over its early-2026 rollout, we find that first use spread primarily through social networks, retention was associated more with engineers' coding activity than with demographics, and adopters merged roughly 24% more pull requests than they would have otherwise. We use merged pull requests as our proxy for output -- acknowledging that a merged PR is not the same as the value it delivers -- and the lift persists across our four-month window. These results suggest that CLI coding agents are neither uniformly adopted nor mere novelty effects and that organizations should treat visible peer use as central to rollout strategy.

Writing code is cheap now - Agentic Engineering Patterns

Writing code is cheap now - Agentic Engineering Patterns

Agentultra - Why I Won't Use AI

If you are a programmer in 2025 you have likely been pressured into adopting generative artificial intelligence tools into your workflow. Maybe you have already been ordered to. You have probably wondered if next year will be the year that you will be replaced with an AI. Or maybe in the next five years. Weren’t we supposed to be replaced already?

Coding After Coders: The End of Computer Programming as We Know It

In the era of A.I. agents, many Silicon Valley programmers are now barely programming. Instead, what they’re doing is deeply, deeply weird.