There Is No Product

The software never had difficulty-value. What was difficult, and what had to be amortized in order to make it acceptable, was the professional-services investment required to make the software locally useful.

AI appears to promise a resurgence of homebrew. But will the auditors like it any better than they liked old-school homebrew?

Thankyou. This is the first time I've properly understood the impact of AI on software. Thank god I'm retired.

My own take on this: the article talks continuously about the price of software, but misses the point of quality. If price was the only variable, then software development in US/Europe would have been wiped out decades ago in favour of software development in cheaper countries. It didn't. Manufacturing was delocalised, but development (the thinking/designing part) stayed.

So the question really is: can AI produce software of the same quality as a person? Can it be equally reliable?