What I build now that the machine writes the code

A third piece, after "" Those were arguments about engineers in general. This one is just about me.

I have written twice now about what AI means for software engineers: what stays valuable when the machine can write the code, and how someone starting out can build those things. This time I want to be concrete and personal, because something specific changed in my own work this year, and it is not the thing people usually talk about.

The headline is not that I type faster, though I do. It is that the list of projects worth starting got much longer. There is a whole category of project that used to be automatically off my list, not because I did not want to do it, but because the cost was obviously higher than the payoff. AI lowered that cost. And when you lower the cost of building, you do not simply do the same things faster. You start things you would never have started at all. Three of those came off the shelf for me this year. One was too big. One needed a skill I do not have. One was too small to ever justify the time.

The one that was too big: WordPress.

For more than fifteen years, , our first HikaShop template, exists because the skill barrier dropped low enough for me to climb over it. The judgment was mine. The hands were partly the machine's.

The ones that were too small to justify: tools just for me.

The change I did not see coming is at the small end. Everyone has a list of daily annoyances they have simply learned to live with, because solving one properly would cost a weekend (or more) you would rather spend on anything else. The annoyance is real, but the fix was never worth it. AI moved that line. A weekend now clears problems I had put up with for years.

Two of mine. I sit on the board of an association that runs in Japanese, which is not my first language, and I was drowning in email I could not keep up with. So I built opens basically any file, code, PDF, Word documents, spreadsheets, images, archives, the lot, in the browser or as an Android app, with nothing ever leaving the device. It even grew its own little family of reusable libraries along the way, which is its own answer to the question of how much one person can take on now.

The thread.

None of this is really about speed. It is about cost. AI made building cheaper, and the interesting consequence of a cheaper anything is not more of the same. It is that things sitting just on the wrong side of "worth it" cross the line. The too-big becomes a few weeks. The out-of-reach becomes reachable. The too-small becomes a Saturday. My old list of "someday, if I ever have the skills and the months" projects mostly collapsed, some into shipped products, some into little tools I now use every day.

I will keep the honesty from the first two pieces, because this cuts both ways. If building is cheap for me, it is cheap for everyone, and the result is a flood of built things. So the scarce, valuable part is no longer the building. It is the judgment about what is worth building at all, and whether what you made is any good. Those are the human questions, the ones the machine does not answer for you. The constraint on my work used to be "can I make this." Now it is much more often "should I, and is it any good," and I think that is the better question to be stuck on.

The machine writing the code did not shrink what I do. It widened it.