Why Are We So Afraid Of Code As A Commodity

Figma's CTO argues that AI is genuinely commoditizing certain kinds of code work, such as translating a design into working markup or porting logic from one language to another. Those tasks were valuable mainly because they took skilled time, and once a model can do them reliably, that value collapses fast. What does not collapse, in his view, is the harder layer of engineering, which is deciding which problems are worth solving, shaping the abstractions a system is built around, and reasoning from first principles when something breaks in a way no pattern-matcher has seen before. That distinction matters for anyone worried that AI is coming for engineering jobs broadly rather than for a specific, narrower slice of the work. It also suggests where engineers should be spending the time AI frees up, which is less on producing code and more on the judgment calls that decide what gets built and why.