Code got cheap. Buying software did not
Writing on Sunday, Simon Willison quoted the analyst Laurie Voss saying the cost of writing code has collapsed, and that the cost of reviewing, fixing and operating it is following1. What is left of making software, Voss argued, is finding out what people actually want, defining it precisely, and making it pleasant to use1. That cost sits with each piece of software and does not transfer to the next one1. Because there is no ceiling on demand for software, Voss expects the amount of it to keep rising, until that per product cost becomes the whole job1. His piece is titled "We are all Product Engineers now"1.
The following morning, ITPro reported that enterprise software is becoming harder to buy, not easier2. It named four causes: AI add-ons, consumption pricing, overlapping tools and complex licensing2. Between them, the report said, they are making procurement increasingly difficult2.
The consequence, according to the same report, is that IT leaders are having to rethink how they judge both value and risk in a purchase2. The two accounts sit on either side of the same trade: cheaper to produce, murkier to price12.
Your software bill is now variable
Neither piece is written from a British desk, and there is no UK regulator or guidance in play here, so treat this as a commercial matter rather than a compliance one. The practical point is that the part of software spend you could once forecast, a licence per seat per year, is being replaced by something that moves with how much your staff and your agents use it. If you are signing anything with consumption pricing in it, the number you care about is not the unit rate, it is the ceiling, and whether you can see the meter before the invoice arrives.
The other half is less comfortable. If producing software is getting cheap, the scarce thing is knowing precisely what you want it to do, and that work cannot be bought in. It is the same reason a badly specified agent costs more than no agent: someone in your business has to define the job before anyone automates it. When we scope work for a client, that definition is most of the effort, and it is the part that survives when the tooling underneath changes again.
Also today
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UK and Indian telecoms to pool AI against fraud
Telecommunications industry leaders in the UK and India have agreed to use artificial intelligence to tackle online fraud, scams and harms, according to a government announcement published on Tuesday7.
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Crawlers spotted a RubyGems flaw first
A developer's account of OpenAI bots knowing about a RubyGems caching vulnerability reached the front page of Hacker News, drawing 453 points and 359 comments, a reminder that crawlers read your infrastructure too6.
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Australia's signals chief warns on ageing systems
Abigail Bradshaw, head of one of Australia's top intelligence agencies, warned that AI attacks could exploit outdated technology and that "enormous" sums are needed to update systems people expect to be always available4.
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Odd allies on American AI rules
The Financial Times reported that the rightwing activist Steve Bannon and the leftwing senator Bernie Sanders are jointly demanding stronger AI regulation, while President Trump called safety warnings a "hoax"5.
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BBC puts the extinction talk in order
The BBC published an explainer on why some people fear AI could threaten humanity and how real those concerns are, after existential warnings resurfaced in the past week3.
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Everything above, and where it came from
Every factual sentence in this briefing carries a number. These are the numbers. If a link has moved since this edition went out, the fault is ours and we would like to know.
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Why enterprise software is becoming harder, not easier, to buy
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Why are there concerns AI could threaten humanity, and how real are they?
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Australia’s outdated technology is vulnerable to AI hacking attacks, signals chief says
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Bannon and Sanders unite over AI safety as Trump condemns warnings as a ‘hoax’
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