LLMs have effectively killed the cost of generating lines of code, but they haven’t touched the cost of truly understanding a problem. We’re seeing a flood of “apps built in a weekend,” but most of these are just thin wrappers around basic CRUD operations and third-party APIs. They look impressive in a Twitter demo, but they often crumble the moment they hit the friction of the real world.
The real cost of software isn’t the initial write; it’s the maintenance, the edge cases, the mounting UX debt, and the complexities of data ownership. These “fast” solutions are brittle.
The real world is constantly changing. It takes teams to keep up.
Quote Citation: Chris Gregori, “Code Is Cheap Now. Software Isn’t. — Chris Gregori”, Jan 10, 2026, https://www.chrisgregori.dev/opinion/code-is-cheap-now-software-isnt