AI didn't make code cheaper. It deleted the thing that made code expensive.

The cost of custom software was never really the code. It was the coordination around it: the team you had to assemble, the managers, the handoffs, the integration meetings, the overhead that grows faster than the team itself. Every person you add to a project adds more than one person's worth of communication.

AI lets a small, senior team skip almost all of that. And here's the part most people miss. The savings compound with size. A smaller project gets maybe twice as cheap, because there's a floor of irreducible work you still have to do. A big one gets four times cheaper or more, because so much more of its old cost was pure coordination tax that simply evaporates.

So the work that used to be a $100K project is now closer to $50K. The work that used to be $2M is now closer to $500K. The bigger the old number, the more waste there was to delete.

One caveat I'll always give you straight: this is a tailwind everyone gets. Cheap is not a moat. The edge isn't that AI made it cheaper. It's knowing exactly where to point it.