Scarcity Doesn’t Disappear. It Moves.

In Why This, Why Now I wrote that AI doesn’t remove the constraint in software so much as move it. The place I keep noticing it is saying no.

For a long time, capacity did the saying no for us. You’d have ten good ideas and engineering time for two, so eight died quietly. Nobody had to be the bad guy. The budget was.

That’s going away. When a prototype costs an afternoon, everything is cheap enough to try. But building was never the only cost. Everything you ship has to be run, secured, and supported, and it competes for attention with everything else you’ve shipped. The question moves from “can we build it?” to “should this exist?”, and somebody has to decide.

The hardest version of that question is about things that already exist. When we pivoted our SaaS business at Corteva, some of what we walked away from was work people had poured years into, me included. A coworker has a mantra for that: kill your darlings. Writers have leaned on the phrase for more than a century, going back to a 1914 lecture by Arthur Quiller-Couch (often misattributed to Faulkner). It means cutting the passages you’re most attached to, often the ones you worked hardest on, because the piece is better without them. Software is the same. If something served its purpose and there’s a better path, letting it go shouldn’t feel like a loss.

Most of us haven’t had much practice at that, and a cheaper prototype isn’t going to give us any.