We are all Product Engineers now

Just yesterday I published a very long post about the economics of open source. As part of that argument, I mentioned that the cost of writing software has collapsed, and that meant the variables in the equation had changed for the first time in thirty years. That led me off on a tangent that grew into this equally long post. I had a bunch of questions to answer. Has the cost of creating software really collapsed? Can I prove that? If the cost of actually producing code goes to zero, what parts of the job of “software developer” really remain? Where, in fact, is the entire industry of software going in the next decade? You can see why I felt it needed a post of its own. I’ve been circling this topic for a while now. In early 2025 I predicted AI would create many more programmers and that their jobs would look different, but I didn’t get into the details of how different, and also that was more than a year ago, an infinity in the compressed timeline of AI. In March this year I found…