Software costs have collapsed: we are all Product Engineers now
rseroter · x · 2026-09-15
Seldo's long-read forecasts the next decade of the software industry:
- The cost of writing software has collapsed. AI pushing code-production cost toward zero changes the industry's economics for the first time in 30 years.
- Assumption 1: agents will eat the entire SDLC. Today's agents write code well but are mediocre at review, testing, debugging, deployment, monitoring and scaling.
- Building on his earlier findings — junior programmer jobs savaged while senior roles grow, and companies substituting compute for labor at record rates.
- The takeaway: when writing code stops being the bottleneck, the remaining job is product judgment — hence "we are all Product Engineers now."
He admits a 10-year forecast is crazy, but argues the variables have already changed.
More from AGI Musings
- Tsinghua-ByteDance 75-page paper maps why recursive AI self-improvement still stalls — alex_verem · 2026-09-15
- 63 Years Ago, AFL-CIO Warned Automation Could Bring 'National Catastrophe' — IsForAt · 2026-09-15
- Olympiad Medalist Argues Only Elite Credentials Still Matter in the AI Era — Beneficial_Owl7036 · 2026-09-15
- Nobel laureate Ressa: limit AI now or humanity loses its agency — goji836 · 2026-09-15
- AI lab leaders' doom messaging is backfiring with the American public — venturetwins · 2026-09-15
- Superdark Factory simulates agent code output ballooning 4,600x by 2029 as human review decays — tylerjdunn · 2026-09-15