I started programming in 1983, at nine, on a home computer with BASIC. No internet, no mobile phones, personal computers still a novelty. That skill has paid for my entire adult life. I went through the dot com crash, the mobile transition, the cloud, and several hype cycles, and each time the work moved somewhere new but the ability to build the thing still belonged to people who could build the thing.

This cycle feels different to me, and I'd like to hear from people who think I'm wrong.

The expensive part of my job, turning a vague idea into working software, is now something a machine does at a fraction of the cost. Not perfectly, and not without someone who knows what good looks like. But well enough that "I can build it" is no longer a differentiator.

I have a data point of my own. I run a small desktop product as a side project, with thousands of users. It grew, then plateaued, and there was no technical cause. It plateaued because I stopped marketing it. The lesson I take is that the durable asset was distribution and attention, not the software, and I had that backwards for twenty years.

There is a larger version of the same observation. Over $3B has been allocated to buying services businesses and applying AI to their margins: $1.5B at General Catalyst, a $1B+ vehicle at Thrive Holdings, with Bessemer, Lightspeed and 8VC also active. Long Lake reached $100M EBITDA in under two years in HOA management and has since agreed to acquire Amex Global Business Travel for $6.3B. Crete Professionals Alliance, now Current, is past $500M revenue across nearly 30 accounting firms, with an OpenAI-built tool that cut tax prep time 31% across 7,000 returns.

If that thesis is right, it implies the scarce asset is the customer relationships and trained workforce, and the software is the commodity input. Which is a fairly direct answer to my question, and not the one I wanted.

I'm now trying to decide where to invest the next fifteen years, and every option feels like a different bet on what stays scarce:

1. Rebuild distribution deliberately and stay in software. 2. Buy a small trade business, heating and cooling specifically, on the theory that physical services stay scarce. 3. Convert a property into a retreat business, betting on in-person experience.

Questions for this crowd:

- For those over 50 in tech: has your market value actually changed in the last two years, or is this anxiety not matching the data? - Has anyone here made the jump from a software career into owning a trade business? What did you underestimate? - If you believe technical skill is still the moat, what specifically do you think stays scarce?

I'm more interested in specific experience than predictions.