When software becomes fast food

João Alves makes a sharp comparison: software is entering its fast-food era. AI has industrialized code production the same way mass manufacturing industrialized cooking. You can generate thousands of lines in minutes, but like fast food, it's cheap, immediate, and "good enough"—not haute cuisine.

Here's what changes: when production becomes easy, judgment becomes the real bottleneck. Following Simon Wardley's terminology, coding is moving from custom-built/product into commodity/utility phase. Once something crosses that boundary, competitive advantage no longer comes from producing it—because it's cheap—but from the decisions around it: architecture, experience, integration, product vision, operations, governance. What can be industrialized will be automated. What requires taste and expertise becomes more valuable.

The industry is shifting toward a power-law world. A small group of highly skilled engineers—senior engineers, staff engineers, architects—will capture disproportionate value. Most will compete in a long tail of abundant supply. The manager becomes a curator of expertise, a multiplier of taste, quality, and systemic thinking. It's like elite football: dramatically fewer people doing the high-value work.

The question isn't whether AI will replace you. The question is what role you want to play in this new league. Quantity is no longer scarce. Taste is. If you're not building your judgment about what makes software coherent, scalable, and enduring, you're choosing to compete in the commodity tier where the only lever left is speed.