The internet did not kill publishing. It broke the unit of value.
The internet did not kill publishing. It broke the unit of value.
If code generation gets "free", what exactly will SaaS customers still be paying for?
In the early web, publishers kept optimizing the wrong thing: pages, cadence, headcount. The real shift was that distribution and monetization moved elsewhere.
When Google and Amazon became the front door, the article became a commodity and the bundle called "a newspaper" lost pricing power. Not because writing stopped mattering, but because the scarce part moved.
LLM code-gen is the same kind of unbundling, aimed at software's most expensive line item. Microsoft, GitHub, Anthropic, OpenAI, Cursor are making "making the thing" faster. That does not automatically make "running the thing" cheaper.
If software follows publishing's journey, the prediction is uncomfortable: Most SaaS will stop being valued for features and start being valued for assurance. Reliability, compliance, integration, domain defaults, and accountability become the product. The UI is the wrapper, the workflow is the moat, and pricing shifts from seats to outcomes and risk transfer.
The tell will be teams shipping more and feeling less in control.
And the unresolved part: when code is abundant, who gets blamed when the system fails?