A thought I had about this topic, this is a simplification of reality to illustrate a point:

Software developers are doing R&D, you create new stuff that continues to exist forever. This is unlike most jobs, in which you produce goods and services that are consumed and then you have to produce them again.

What if we are getting to the point where all of the low-hanging stuff is invented? For example, every bank has an app which works and rarely needs to be changed. Or take a social network like Facebook, going from zero to a product with 1B users took a lot of development but since then, it's been mostly static, why employ thousands of developers dedicated to Facebook? Etc.

These are the right questions and core to the actual “ai race”

Before ai, all we had was compilers and interpreters to take instructions and turn them into machine code and byte code

A lot of political painstaking went into which compilers and even with “better options” there’s only really a couple big fish of workflows to take an orgs ideas to production.

What passes as a compiler and what passes for a programming language exploded.

I’m very interested in “the final compile target” of these systems AND the output of that still being human readable and influenceable.

> it's been mostly static

In a well-functioning competitive market, no company should be able to rest on its laurels. The problem is industries have consolidated and trustbusters are nowhere to be found.

Notice when tech is new (the web, smart phones, AI) there's an initial burst of competitive companies? That's because the market hasn't consolidated yet. Ask yourself how many dot-com millionaires would realistically be able to duplicate their success in 2026, given the same product but launching today.

Aside from consolidation, discoverability is a huge problem, especially in the era of AI slop. Building a superior product is easy, getting it noticed and building traction is hard.