Anyone Can Make Software Now. But When Does A Side Project Become Production Ready?

Author's note: In the spirit of fairly critiquing AI and practicing a suggestion I end the article with, this article and the accompanying illustration were created entirely without AI assistance. Agentic coding AI is here, and it’s transforming the software industry. But with agentic coding out now for over a year, has it felt like the software industry has really transformed? From my from vantage point, although there are some really cool projects that have been built only because of new agentic coding tools, it generally feels like we’re awash in a sea of software slop. Tim Kadlec wrote a great article, “Losing Focus” , that really resonated with me, especially this quote: “I don’t think the quality of software has increased all that much in in the past 12 months. I think maybe the amount of software has, but it’s very, very hard to find software that’s reliable.” - Max Scoening, Head of Product at Notion I’ve been hearing loads of stories and murmurs about AI from the people I know in tech, and I think there’s a lot being lost in the binary divide that a lot of people seem to fall into - either AI is bad and can do nothing right, or AI is the new future of engineering, and every company should have all their code written by AI today . I want to posit that right now we’re in the messy middle. An era of hype and grifters that want to sell you an AI fantasy that hasn’t been reached, which obscures the real present - powerful AI tools that can speed up professional developers, but can lure non-developers into shipping products that aren’t nearly ready for prime-time. My Background But first, if you don’t know me, let me explain why you should listen to my perspective. I’ve been working professionally in software (specifically web development, focused on the frontend), for over ten years. In that time I’ve worked at a non-profit, a for-profit, led a small startup, freelanced, and have led a number of open-source volunteer teams at Chi Hack Night , including right now