#1Speed turns into reach. People did not turn faster transport into saved time, but into reach: they still travel about an hour a day, just farther (Marchetti’s constant). With AI, the constant is the programmer’s attention and time. Generation is fast, but not instant. Teams will not work less; they will reach further and build larger, more complex systems [1].

#2Aging will speed up. Software does not age on its own, but because the world around it moves. AI speeds up the surrounding world, so even old hand-written code ages faster, unless AI also makes its modernization cheaper [2].

#3 The advantage leaves the code. AI is a factory of common practice  and makes cheap everything that is public. The advantage lies in knowledge, experience and the way a team works, which cannot be copied because they are the result of years of evolution. When everyone can cook, the chef’s taste and intuition decide: what to make and what to leave out [3].

#4 What cannot be sped up grows in value. The scarcest things are those that can be sped up only a little: understanding and verifying code, but also earning trust, building a brand and a user base [4].

What grows slowly matures slowly, but also ages more slowly [5].

1. Marchetti, C. (1994). Anthropological invariants in travel behavior. Technological Forecasting and Social Change 47(1), 75–88.
2. Parnas, D. L. (1994). Software Aging. ICSE 1994.
3. Goddard, J., Eccles, T. (2013). Uncommon Sense, Common Nonsense. Profile Books.
4. Baumol, W. J. (1967). Macroeconomics of unbalanced growth: the anatomy of urban crisis. American Economic Review 57, 415–426.
5. Šmalgauzen (Schmalhausen), I. I. (1926). Problema smerti i bessmertija (Проблема смерти и бессмертия). Moskva–Leningrad: Gosizdat.