Kim Salmi
Developer & CTO
Software cost goes towards zero
The Kierrätyskeskus online store has 200k+ secondhand items and the search filters used to work fine on mobile. Then an update broke them. I emailed them about it in February 2025 and over a year later it is still not fixed. So I rebuilt their site with Claude in 10 minutes.*
Now the cost of building the missing piece is lower than the cost of complaining about it.
I think we’ll be there in three to six months—where AI is writing 90 percent of the code. And then in twelve months, we may be in a world where AI is writing essentially all of the code. But the programmer still needs to specify, you know, what are—what are the conditions of what you’re doing, what—you know, what is the overall app you’re trying to make, what’s the overall design decision? How do we collaborate with other code that’s been written? You know, how do we have some common sense on whether this is a secure design or an insecure design?
The implications go wider than one annoyed customer rebuilding a webshop on a Saturday:
- Vendor leverage thins. If customers can rebuild the whole application in an afternoon, "we'll fix it next quarter" stops being a roadmap and starts being a dare.
- Technical excellence compounds. When generation is cheap and fast, the bottleneck moves to shipping with certainty. CI/CD, infrastructure, automated tests, quality gates, observability, security: these have always been how you ship with confidence, no matter who or what wrote the code.
- Code is commoditized. If anyone can ship it, the code itself stops being the moat [sic, it was never really the moat, unless you are hardcore]. What is left is execution, data, distribution, brand, hardware. The developer's job moves faster towards customer value than ever before, in most cases your value lies in the what, not the how. Of course that has been the case forever, but now only more so. Developer and product roles overlap more than ever, and I do not see them separating again. At some point they might just be one role.
- The long tail goes custom. For one-off internal tools and single-workflow needs, building the exact thing beats subscribing to something close. Every company quietly grows a fleet of small bespoke apps.
- Agents reshape the business itself. The next step is not humans prompting for apps, it is agents modifying business processes on the fly (with guardrails), building custom software when needed, or spawning sub-agents to build it for them. This requires company information like never before. The winners are the companies already documenting everything in writing, like GitLab's all-remote handbook. The next evolution is purpose-built company brains, like GBrain, where the context lives and evolves in ways agents can best use them.
- Software for an audience of one becomes normal. Most code shipped this decade will have exactly one user, and that is fine.
Software cost goes towards zero, the slop gets less sloppy every month, and the output of AI-generated code is not slowing down. The things you used to tolerate are now a prompt away from gone.
Links
* To be clear, mirroring product data and images from someone else's store is probably not strictly legal, it likely bumps into Finland's database right (Tekijänoikeuslaki 49 §) and copyright on the product images. I am running this as a usability and accessibility fix, not a competing service. As the info page says: I don't sell anything, there are no ads, I don't store user data, and the Buy button takes you straight to kauppa.kierratyskeskus.fi where the actual purchase happens. The moment Kierrätyskeskus fixes the mobile filter, this site becomes unnecessary and I take it down. I will also take it down immediately if Kierrätyskeskus asks.