There is a point in every product's life where it crosses a threshold. The person who built it can still explain it. But the person who just joined cannot.
The complexity is not in the code. It is in the context. The decisions that were made. The compromises that were accepted. The edge cases that were built around. The technical debt that was deferred.
No one writes those down. They just become the way things are.
The threshold is crossed when the product can no longer be fully understood by one person. Not because the person is less capable. Because the product has absorbed too many decisions that no one remembers making.
Some reports and industry estimates suggest that real inference cost can be 5 10x higher than what companies currently charge, depending on model size, context length, and infrastructure load.
So the market is not really stable yet. It s still in a growth phase, supported by subsidized pricing and scale. And usage is already massive.
Saw a post from an 8-year dev this week. He said any junior with an agent now matches his output, and he feels no pride left in it. It got huge, because a lot of people quietly feel the same.
I read it from the other side. I'm a designer, not an engineer. For years "can you build this" meant "find someone technical and pray they stay interested." Usually they didn't. AI took the thing that hurt that dev and handed it to me.
Same shift. Loss from one seat, freedom from another.
I'm shipping a Mac app solo right now, as someone who can't write a backend from scratch. Two years ago that was a joke.
