Code is cheap now.
Knowing what to build is the hard part.
AI made the answers free. The whole value of software moved to the question: what should exist, for whom, and what does right look like.
For about a week after AI arrived, it looked like the job was finished. Describe what you want, get working code back. The thing that had cost the most, the typing, was suddenly nearly free.
Almost everyone stopped there. Faster code, same old process wrapped around it. Requirements still guessed. Testing still squeezed. What ships is still whatever someone had time to check.
If the code was free, why were projects still late, still wrong, still arguing about what done meant? Because the code was never the expensive part. The question was.
So we asked the same question of every other step: requirements, design, testing, deployment, support. Could each be automated, and done better than people do it? Step by step, yes. The result is an automated SDLC: an idea goes in, running software comes out, and a person steps in only where judgment is needed.
When answers are free, the only thing left worth paying for is the question. The businesses still buying faster answers are buying the wrong thing.
AI-TR24 is the work of Tom Richardson. For the better part of two years, most of it at sixty hours a week, he has been testing one idea against real businesses: that the hard part of software is no longer writing it.
He writes about what those two years taught him: where AI builds break, what actually worked, and why the expensive part of software moved from the answer to the question.
Read the articles on LinkedInIf you're deciding what to build next, that's the conversation I want to have.
Or write to tom@ai-tr24.com