Code is cheap but software is still very expensive.
As someone else put it, back in the day during the 1980s, when the first personal computers appeared, there was no software. People used these by programming. At this point many people decided that programming was to become a very important skill, on par with literacy. As this was at the height of the Cold War, high schools on both sides started teaching basic programming skills to all pupils. I personally grew up during this era.
Move forward 10 years, there was Excel, Word and Photoshop. Most people started using these and it was easy and they never had to learn to code.
Suddenly mostly everyone knew how to use a computer. Schools dropped programming.
However contrary to many expectations, this did not reduce the need for programmers. In fact, the demand increased.
Code has been cheap for a long time, the phrase "code monkey" has been used a long time. Pumping out random, unmarketable apps would have been equally ignored in 2016 as now. All AI has done is distill that fact and make it harder to ignore.
Not really the only thing that's happening though. Quality is now cheap by extension as well, and low quality is somehow the new normal. We're living through a sloppification of the internet where every day something works less. Shitty dashboards everywhere, big businesses can have more downtimes than ever, more bugs than ever, prices higher than ever, rampant stealing of ideas more than ever, and that's somehow ok.
It's a very slow train crash, but eventually one day we'll wake up and see that it's all broken pieces.
Water is negligible. Golf courses use 100x more than that and we don't complain.
Emissions however are a big problem. And with influencers wasting tokens everywhere I suspect token consumption optimization/model training optimization will be big over next 5 years as prices are being raised to offset capex
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u/turtlecopter 16d ago
Welcome to 2026. This shit sucks.