The future of software: smaller teams, more demanding systems
The individual productivity of people who write software has grown sharply. The less-discussed side effect is that the cost of producing bad code fell along with it — and bad code at volume is a debt that comes due fast.
The bottleneck moved
When implementation speeds up, the limiting factor becomes clarity about the problem. Teams that invest in discovery, scope definition and acceptance criteria extract far more value from the acceleration than teams that simply produce more screens.
Maintenance is the new differentiator
A system lives for years. What determines total cost is how easy it is to change safely: tests that actually mean something, well-defined boundaries, observability, and decision documentation. None of that is generated for free — it's chosen.
- Explicit boundaries between domain, presentation and integration.
- Tests focused on business rules and critical paths.
- A record of architecture decisions and the reasoning behind them.
- Monitoring that flags a regression before the user complains.
What changes in hiring
Hiring hours of typing makes less and less sense. What sustains results is hiring accountability for an asset: someone who understands the problem, proposes the architecture, delivers in short cycles, and keeps answering for the system after go-live.
In short
The advantage isn't producing more code — it's producing less system for the same result, and maintaining it well.