https://alexdanco.com/2025/03/27/scarcity-and-abundance-in-2025/
Alex Danco back with a rumination on a what is becoming abundant and that that makes scarce. The two takeaways I had were:
a) How we think about code changes to a more malleabe, more immediate driver of value rather than some inherent store of value itself.
b) The easiest place to deploy agents is in areas where you are both already doing the work, but also where that work is executed by somewhat lower-accountability folks (e.g. vendors, contractors, maybe very junior staff).
It might be a bit too flippant to say, “We’re evolving from a mindset where the codebase is capital (the past few decades of software) and into a mindset where code is labor.” But this is a blog post, so it suits the medium. And it suits today’s energy: new projects and startups are writing a lot more code on the basis of “does this make me money now” (what Simon Wardley would’ve once called “worth-driven development”): the codebase is more like a workforce to be trained than like a factory line to be architected. You still want to put thought in it, but it’s a different kind of thoughtfulness. And you expect profit generation out of it a lot more aggressively than with patient capital deployment.
The two points are connected. Most very large companies have a real but unspoken delineation between different types of code. Some code is absolutely bullet proof, very closely monitored, and staffed for proactive, ongoing maintenance and enhancement. And some code is… not that.
We generally don’t explicitly call out the gradations, but we do put different degrees of gating around things. Getting better at both the identification and fencing of critical things (load bearing vs decorative, from a business point of view) will be necessary to unlock the pace of potential improvements via agentic systems, and to focus human attention on the areas where there is a very high inherent complexity/ambiguity.