Ground truth:
An old system ready for “retirement” still needs maintenance because its fielded in high value roles. A couple of guys about 70 years old, one of which suffered damage to his executive and short term memory function, and the other just re-entering into the system he helped build >30 years ago, just out performed a substantial team of younger guys* by about a factor of 10.
Part of this is due to experience but the other part is a very recent discontinuity in LLM code assistance that made even $30/month coding assistance a superpower.
Here’s the real market gap:
Brownfield (ie: old systems that must be modified and no one likes doing that kind of work – especially not our young Desi betters who have better things to do like be given a Greenfield mandate by centralized pots of gold like Musk) software has enormous value in production and Brownfield organizations are still thinking that they’re being cutting edge by introducing the stuff from Satya et al.
I’m not in a very good position to monetize this myself because our older Desi betters are occupying the positions in Brownfield projects that determine who gets money.
* I should probably clarify that even the younger guys in Brownfield organizations aren’t prepared to be dragged kicking and screaming into an order of magnitude productivity gain – especially not given they are frequently under the command of the aforementioned elders among our Desi betters who may not be prepared to do anything but “Buy IBM” as the old adage went.