Nobody's Asking About Maintenance

Lots of software has gotten very cheap. A lot of it, actually. What used to cost real money to build can now be spun up by people who've never written a line of code. That's genuinely exciting!

There are more non-technical people contributing to the web right now than at any point in history. That's cool! And scary.

…But building something is only half the battle…

"I built a full app in 20 minutes." Cool. Who's fixing it in six months when the API changes? Who's patching it when a customer finds an edge case? Who's iterating on it week after week to actually solve the business problem it was supposed to solve?

Nobody's posting that video because it's boring!

Running business-critical software is a marathon, not a sprint. It's diligence. It's the slow, unglamorous work of maintaining, testing, and adapting systems over time to meet real customer needs. You can't sprint forever.

And here's the thing: maintenance is the opportunity.

Building got democratized. Great. That means the gap isn't in who can create anymore — it's in who can sustain. The people and teams who figure out the long game, who treat software like something you tend rather than something you ship and forget, are the ones who'll own the next decade.