AI Delivers What Open Source Promised
Open source made the code free but left the expertise expensive.
The knowledge gap remained. You still needed to know how to use it, configure it, integrate it, debug it. The barrier moved from “can’t afford the software” to “can’t afford the people who understand it.” Free software still required expensive knowledge.
AI closes the knowledge gap. Now the software and the expertise are effectively free.
This is what open source was trying to do: make software useful for all. It got halfway there. AI completes the journey.
The Wrong Anxiety
The job anxiety is solving the wrong problem. “Will AI take my job writing code?” is the wrong question.
The right question: what have I always wanted to build that I couldn’t because the production cost was too high?
The answer to that question is now different for everyone. The constraint that was blocking you — engineering resources, expertise, production cost — is gone or radically reduced. The problem you wanted to solve is still there. Go solve it.
The Bottleneck Moves
Software was the hard part. It isn’t anymore.
Every domain blocked by software complexity just got unblocked simultaneously. Healthcare systems that couldn’t be built because the engineering cost was too high. Educational tools that required teams. Scientific infrastructure that needed dedicated software engineers. The problems were real. The bottleneck was production.
The bottleneck moves now. It moves to:
- Identifying problems worth solving
- Domain knowledge deep enough to know what good looks like
- Judgment to evaluate whether the solution actually works
- Trust built through demonstrated results
Everything else is now solvable. And everything else is vast.
Who Thrives, Who Struggles
The people who thrive: those who had real problems they wanted to solve and were waiting for the tools. The barrier was never their ideas — it was the cost of execution. That cost just dropped.
The people who struggle: those whose entire value was in the production difficulty itself. If the moat was the expertise and the expertise is now free, the moat is gone. This is not a personal failing — it’s a structural shift. But it’s real.
The transition is: from valuing people who can build things, to valuing people who know what’s worth building and can tell whether it was built right.
Post 2 in a series on the AI economic shift. Previously: Software Is the Modern Rai Stone. Next: Three Waves of Democratization.