People. Process. Product.

Lots of software has gotten very cheap. A lot of it, actually. What used to cost real money to build can now be spun up by people who've never written a line of code. That's genuinely exciting!

There are more non-technical people contributing to the web right now than at any point in history. That's cool! And scary.

…But building something is only half the battle…

"I built a full app in 20 minutes." Cool. Who's fixing it in six months when the API changes? Who's patching it when a customer finds an edge case? Who's iterating on it week after week to actually solve the business problem it was supposed to solve?

Nobody's posting that video because it's boring!

Running business-critical software is a marathon, not a sprint. It's diligence. It's the slow, unglamorous work of maintaining, testing, and adapting systems over time to meet real customer needs. You can't sprint forever.

And here's the thing: maintenance is the opportunity.

Building got democratized. Great. That means the gap isn't in who can create anymore — it's in who can sustain. The people and teams who figure out the long game, who treat software like something you tend rather than something you ship and forget, are the ones who'll own the next decade.

I've been building complex stuff with AI lately. Things that would have taken weeks are taking minutes. You look at what you just made and think, yeah, that's pretty good. Look at all that!

It's a trap.

You're moving fast. You're riding this wave of productivity that feels incredible. And it is incredible. But there's this pervasive feeling of good enough… Look at how much we did! Look at how fast we did it!

But good enough is only good enough.

I've said it for years: the last 20% is the last 80%. That was true before AI. The first 80% arrives so fast that you haven't even warmed up yet to your own idea. Your brain is already moving on to the next thing. But the details, edge cases, the copy, the feel of the thing — that still takes time. Maybe two or three times longer than your first shot.

Speed is a gift, but be sure it doesn't make you lazy.