“Code is cheap now…”
I’ve been hearing this phrase a lot lately.
And the more I hear it, the more I think about the role of developers — and the path I’ve gone through over the past 13 years.
How it started
At the beginning of my career, I loved layout work.
I enjoyed building interfaces — although back then they weren’t really interfaces yet. They were websites: endless landing pages, promo projects, and all sorts of static pages.
Not everything worked out immediately. There was a constant struggle:
- browser compatibility
- later, smartphones and responsive layouts
The workflow looked something like this:
- Take a design in Adobe Photoshop
- Export PNGs
- Open PixelPerfect in Chrome
- Compare dimensions
- Try to match fonts
- Worry about users on Internet Explorer (or something equally painful)
I even remember searching for designs on Dribbble, coding them just for practice, and adding those projects to my résumé as examples.
Back then, this felt important — a real indicator of a developer’s skill.
The shift
And then it hit me.
The kind of development that brought me into the industry is changing — fast.
The other day, a junior layout developer shared a landing page he’d built.
It probably took him a day or two.
Out of curiosity, I tried recreating the same landing page using Cursor.
Result:
- A page basically ready for release
- ~2 minutes of work
- Fill in the content
- Deploy
- Done
Cost?
- $20 per month subscription
- For that session — probably less than $1 in tokens
You connect Figma MCP, choose Codex or Opus, wait a couple of minutes — and your design is already in code.
What used to take days now takes minutes.
What matters now
This feels like a really interesting moment to invest in yourself — to find something new within the same field you’re already in.
I’m honestly glad I became a manager — both literally and figuratively — because telling agents what to do is, in the end, much more enjoyable than doing everything yourself.
Fundamental knowledge still matters.
But what matters even more now is flexibility — the ability to adapt to everything new that keeps appearing in our industry.
Being in denial today is basically admitting that your peak as a developer is already behind you.
Yes, the AI hype can be exhausting.
But when there are models that write code roughly the way I did a couple of years ago — only much faster and with far fewer distractions — ignoring them is simply irrational.
The full phrase
The full version goes like this:
“Code is cheap now. Software isn’t.”
We’re still needed — at least for now.
But our role is changing.
And the sooner we accept that, the sooner we’ll be able to benefit from new models and tools.
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