Code is, I think, rapidly becoming a commodity. It used to be that the code itself was what was valuable (Microsoft MS-DOS vs. the IBM PC hardware). And it has stayed that way for a long time.

FOSS meant that the cost of building on reusable components was nearly zero. Large public clouds meant the cost of running code was negligible. And now the model providers (Anthropic, Google, OpenAI) means that the cost of producing the code is relatively small. When the marginal cost of producing code approaches zero, we start optimizing for all the things around it. Code is now like steel. It's somewhat valuable by itself, but we don't need the town blacksmith to make us things anymore.

What is still valuable is the intuition to know what to build, and when to build it. That's the je ne sais quoi still left in our profession.