In 20 years, power in tech companies shifted three times. We're entering the third shift now, and most people are watching the wrong thing.
They think AI is eliminating coders. Actually, AI is eliminating the power structure that made coders replaceable.
Era 1: When Coders Had Power (1990s-2000s)
Before open source ate the world, technical knowledge was proprietary. Your database team spoke a different language than your competitor's. Your deployment rituals were yours alone. Every company's technical stack was unique, contextual, tribal.
This made senior developers irreplaceable. You couldn't just hire away IBM's team and get IBM's capabilities. The knowledge lived in people, in practices, in culture that took years to build.
Developers had power because their knowledge couldn't be commoditized. Technical managers hated this.
Era 2: The Manager Power Grab (2010s-2020s)
Open source was technical managers' solution. MySQL replaced custom databases. Linux replaced proprietary Unix. GitHub replaced institutional knowledge. Suddenly every company could download the same stack, follow the same tutorials.
The playbook became: Standardize the stack. Make developers interchangeable. Scale through process, not people.
It worked brilliantly. The technical hiring rubric emerged: "5 years Python, 3 years AWS, knows React." Developers became RAM sticks you slot in. Good for managers who could now run 50-person engineering orgs with predictable velocity.
Competitive advantage shifted from "we have better engineers" to "we have better engineering management." Power moved from the coders to the people managing coders at scale.
The cost? Companies lost technical differentiation. Everyone used the same tools, built the same architectures, solved problems the same way. Custom software was too expensive when you could just configure the standard tool.
Era 3: Business-Coders Take Power (2025+)
AI breaks the scaling advantage that made managers valuable.
One developer who understands systems + business + AI can now do what ten commodity developers couldn't: build custom software that creates competitive advantage, fast.
Not by prompting blindly. By understanding what needs to be built, architecting the solution, and using AI to execute rapidly. AI handles boilerplate. The human handles business logic, edge cases, and "how does this actually need to work?"
This changes everything:
Custom software is economically viable again. You're not choosing between "expensive custom build" and "cheap standard tool." You're choosing "fast custom build with AI" versus "slow configuration of standard tool." Custom wins.
Small technical teams beat large managed ones. Five people who deeply understand your business and can code with AI > 50-person org with managers, process, and commodity developers.
Technical managers without technical skills become bottlenecks. When one developer with AI moves at 10x speed, the "people manager" who can't evaluate technical decisions just slows things down.
Power shifts to the business-coder: someone who understands what creates value AND how to build it.
Who Wins
Not the pure business person who can't code—they need increasingly detailed specs and sophisticated partners to verify AI output.
Not the pure coder who doesn't understand business—they build technically impressive solutions to problems nobody has.
Not the pure manager who doesn't code—their scaling advantage disappears when AI amplifies individuals.
The winner: the person who sees a business opportunity, understands systems deeply enough to architect a solution, and wields AI to build it before competitors finish their requirements doc.
The Return of Competitive Advantage
Open source gave everyone the same building blocks. Managers scaled teams to configure those blocks predictably. Now AI lets individuals build unique structures with those blocks, at speed.
Competitive advantage returns to software itself—your specific business logic, your unique workflows, your proprietary processes. Your competitor can't npm install your competitive advantage anymore.
We're not eliminating coders. We're eliminating the management layer that succeeded in making coders replaceable. The coder who understands business and systems? They just got their power back.
Era 3 is here. The question is: which side of the power shift are you on?