I Think Developers Are Building Too Much Software

There was a time when the difficult part of building software was writing the software. Today, that is increasingly not true. We have better frameworks, better libraries, better APIs, better cloud infrastructure, better developer tools, and now AI can generate a significant amount of the code for us. Yet I keep seeing the same pattern: We are getting better at building things, but not necessarily better at deciding what should be built. And I think that is becoming one of the biggest engineering problems of our time. Software Has Become Too Easy to Start Think about what it takes to build an application today. You can generate a frontend in minutes. Connect an API. Add authentication. Add a database. Deploy it. Add an AI model. Give the model access to tools. Add an agent. Add another service. Add monitoring. Add a queue. Add a vector database. Add an orchestration framework. Before long, you have a surprisingly sophisticated architecture. And sometimes you have solved a problem that didn't actually require any of it. This is the paradox of modern software development: The cheaper it becomes to build software, the easier it becomes to build unnecessary software. AI Made This Problem Bigger AI has changed the equation even further. Previously, I might have spent several hours implementing a feature. Today, I can describe the feature and have an AI coding assistant generate much of the implementation. That is incredibly useful. But it also removes an important friction. When building something required significant effort, effort itself acted as a filter. You naturally asked: "Is this worth building?" When implementation becomes cheap, that question becomes easier to ignore. You can simply build it. And then build another version. And then add another feature. And then add an agent because the agent framework looks interesting. The cost of implementation falls. But the cost of complexity does not disappear. Every Feature Creates a Future Problem A feature rarely costs