There is an old pattern
that keeps coming back.
Make a thing cheaper
and people do not use
the same amount for less money.
They use far more of it.
Roads get wider
and the traffic arrives
to fill them.
Storage gets cheap
and nobody deletes anything
ever again.
Writing code is getting cheaper.
So the expectation is not
that you will write
the same amount more calmly.
The expectation is volume.
More features.
More services.
More surface.
More of everything
that was previously rationed
by how long it took to type.
That is the part people miss
when they talk about
what the machine saves.
The typing was never
the expensive half.
Every line that arrives
has to be read by someone,
reviewed by someone,
deployed by someone,
and understood at three in the morning
by someone who did not write it.
Those costs did not fall.
They are per line,
and the lines went up.
So the pressure moves.
Not away from engineering.
Into the narrow parts
that did not get cheaper.
Deciding what not to build.
Holding a system
in one coherent shape.
Knowing which of these
twelve plausible options
will still be defensible
in two years.
Reading carefully,
which is slow,
and stays slow.
That is where the next ten years
of scarcity lives.
Which means the useful question
is not what the machine can do.
It is what got cheap around you,
and what went up in value
because of it.
When answers got cheap,
good questions got expensive.
When drafting got cheap,
taste got expensive.
When building got cheap,
restraint got expensive,
and so did the person
who can say no
with a reason
that survives the meeting.
None of that is nostalgia
for a slower way of working.
It is just arithmetic.
Abundance on one side of a system
always creates a shortage
on the other side,
and the shortage is where
the interesting work went.
Go and stand
where the cost did not fall.
That is where you get paid.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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