alt Hacker NewsI think looking at what the web did to the journalism industry as a model to what's happening to the software dev industry is worth while. Journalism didn't go away but it did completely change. Many old school journalists just couldn't adapt and left the industry, many papers died too.
Many things only have value because of scarcity.
Digital products such as "photoshop" have had value because people need a tool like that and there's only a limited number of competition, i.e. scarcity. The scarcity exists because of the cost. I.e. the cost of creating "photoshop"creates limit for how many "photoshops" exist. When you bring down the cost you'll have more "photoshops" when you have more "photoshops" as the volume increases the value decreases. Imagine if you can just tell claude "write me photoshop", go take a dump and come back 30 mins later to a running photoshop. You wouldn't now pay 200USD for a license, now would you? You'd pay 0USD.
If you now create a tool that can (or promises it) can obliterate the costs, it means essentially anyone can produce "photoshop". And when anyone can do it it will be done over and over and at which point they're worth zero and you can't give them away.
The same thing has happened to media publishing, print media -> web, computer games etc.
Then the problem is that when your product is worth zero you can no longer make a business by creating your product, so in order to survive you must look into alternative revenue streams such as ads, data mining etc. None of which are a benefit to to the product itself.