Now that any service can be built with AI, nobody wants to build anything

I’ve been noticing a strange paradox with AI-assisted coding. A few years ago, if you had an idea for a software service, building it was the hard part. You needed months of development, a decent team, money, infrastructure, and a lot of specialized knowledge. Today, one competent developer using AI can build in days or weeks what might have taken a small team months. You would think this would lead to an explosion of new software products. But I’m starting to wonder if the opposite is happening. When something is difficult to build, building it creates value. There’s a barrier to entry. You can spend six months creating something and reasonably believe that thousands of other people aren’t going to reproduce it next weekend. Now imagine you have a great SaaS idea. You spend two weeks building it with AI. Great. But so can everyone else. And if the idea succeeds, competitors can inspect what you did and build something similar incredibly quickly. The technical moat is disappearing. That changes the psychological equation. Why spend months polishing a product when you know the implementation itself has almost no scarcity? AI may have dramatically reduced the cost of building software, while simultaneously reducing the incentive to build software. Maybe the scarce thing is no longer the ability to create the product. Maybe it’s distribution, brand, proprietary data, network effects, domain expertise, or simply having customers before you start. In other words, we may be entering a world where software becomes almost free to create, but increasingly difficult to turn into a business. Does anyone else feel this? Are you building more side projects because of AI, or have you actually become less motivated because everything now feels trivially reproducible?