Caring

A little over two years ago, I wrote a piece called “The Implications of Software Abundance.”

As a developer who has been using AI tools from the beginning, starting with GitHub Copilot as essentially supercharged autocomplete and evolving into tools like Claude Code with Opus 4.5, I saw early on that AI was going to let developers write more and more code, and that this shift would happen quickly.

Because it was going to become dramatically easier to write code, I predicted we’d enter an era of “software abundance.” And that’s exactly what’s happened. The cost of producing software has gone way down and code is no longer the bottleneck.

In that piece, I outlined three things I believed would grow in importance in an age of software abundance:

• Great ideas

• Marketing and distribution

• High-quality UI/UX

I still think these three are essential if you want to build something that stands out in a world flooded with software. But I missed one important factor, and in hindsight it may be the most important one: caring.

As building and creating things become more of a commodity, caring, passion, and genuinely believing in what you’re building become scarcer. When anyone can spin up a product in a weekend, what’s rare isn’t the ability to start, it’s the willingness to keep going. Scarcity has shifted from technical skill to emotional commitment.

Yes, someone can vibe-code apps quickly now. But will they care enough to maintain it? Will they care when users ask for edge cases, integrations, migrations, and the tenth “small” feature request that turns out not to be small at all? AI can help with maintenance, debugging, and new features, but it can’t supply persistence. Someone still has to decide that the work is worth doing.

Caring also underpins the other three factors. You don’t market well unless you actually believe in what you’re building. You don’t figure out distribution unless you’re obsessed with who it’s for and why it matters. You need plenty of care to put in the time required to craft great UI/UX, to sweat the details that most people won’t consciously notice but will absolutely feel. Without that underlying motivation, the work becomes a grind instead of a pursuit.

So, work on things you know you’ll care about. Not just for a few months, but for years. You’re likely to care more about problems you keep thinking about even when you’re not supposed to be working, from users you actually want to help, and from products you’d be slightly annoyed existed if you weren’t the one building them.

In a world where anyone can build almost anything, caring might be the moat