Code Is Cheap Now, and That Changes Everything

The wake-up call

It has been reported that Kent Beck — the engineer who popularised Test-Driven Development and Extreme Programming — tweeted in April 2023 that “90% of my skills just went to zero dollars. 10% of my skills just went up 1000x.” It has been reported that, in a November 2025 podcast appearance, he clarified that the 10% includes vision, milestone-setting and complexity control — the strategic skills that machines can’t yet replace — rather than the nitty-gritty syntax of a language. Short sentence: that stings. Long sentence: it reframes what “being a developer” will mean when the hard, costly part of coding is no longer the bottleneck.

A $350K weekend

It has been reported that Paul Ford tested this new reality after Anthropic gave Pro subscribers $1,000 in Claude Code credits in November 2025. Over a weekend he ported an ancient custom blog format to a modern CMS, built a timeline visualisation, and spun up an OwnCast clone for roughly $150 in credits. He allegedly described the experience as “like playing with a Tamagotchi, if a Tamagotchi was a forty-person engineering and product team.” Ford’s reckoning: at 2021 retail rates, the dataset conversion alone would have cost about $350,000 — a jaw-dropper that makes the industry’s old cost models look prehistoric.

Why this matters

Code used to be the scarce resource that shaped planning, estimation, sprint rituals and every product prioritisation meeting you’ve endured. It has been reported that Beck’s September 2025 essay, “Programming Deflation,” argues falling production costs won’t simply shrink headcounts but will unlock vast latent demand — problems nobody bothered solving because software was too expensive. So what’s the emotional core? Relief and panic, tangled together. Relief that many small problems can finally get solved. Panic because the skills that matter are shifting toward orchestration, design and judgment. The question now: can the industry evolve from “write more code” to “design better futures”? Time to learn to lead, not just to type.

Sources: perevillega.com, Hacker News