This has happened in several fields, and will continue to happen for the foreseeable future. The cost of cloth is scarcely more than the cost of the yarn it's made from, because machine time on a loom is practically zero. That change happened much to the chagrin of the Luddites that lost their jobs over it, but in the end everyone is much better off because of it.

The marginal price for producing a video is practically nothing, with most of the world's population carrying around video equipment in a cell phone that outperforms what a video production company would have used decades ago, after spending the equivalent of several years wages to procure. The effect has been a rapidly rising video industry on the likes of YouTube and TikTok, majorly upsetting the entrenched video production houses from decades ago, and creating significant job losses for those companies, but growing the industry as a whole.

Having similarly marginal costs to software production will likely have a similar effect, where directing what to do with the software will become more important than the writing of the software itself, and individuals in their free time will be competitive against industry giants.

There are no barriers to creating software. There are no barriers to copying software. But there are still moats around some software businesses: non-technical which AI does not directly impact. Nonetheless, advertising is not the only way to win and there's no need to be nostalgic. We will adapt to the new era.

I know this isn't the point of your post, but as an aside, how come Intuit is an example of being grandfathered in? I wonder if we'll see the rise of plain text accounting[1] in an AI world as it can be easier for AI agents to deal with.

[1] https://plaintextaccounting.org/

The cost of software has always been trivial, relative to the value it delivers.

The real driving factor is support, and open source tends to be very extractive when it comes to support, leading to burn-out and dead projects.

The reason Intuit and others can maintain a monopoly on the particular software they've created (and not lose it to LLM generated or open source clones) is that they have support that won't disappear on a whim, probably.

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Open source software eats the world.

To me, the things we need/want being free is a massive positive, not a negative at all. Wouldn't you rather all your expenses were reduced and your needs were met more precisely, than that you had persistent unnecessary expenses?

I understand how as someone wishing to make money this may be undesirable. But I think it is worth considering the bigger picture of what a high-cost life vs a low-cost life looks like for us as individuals, and as a society.