There’s a lot of software out there where either (1) the users are captive users, or (2) actual outcomes don’t matter, and the important thing is to check the box, to have officially pretended to build the thing.

That’s the sort of software where development costs are especially painful for the MBAs, and where pushing the frontiers of the “fast build, low quality” quadrant for may be a killer market — even if it’s just fast and not so cheap.

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Highly optimized code is of course extremely expensive to develop — both to build and maintain. But now even just-average-performance code is the more costly alternative.

And sure, grinding out a vibe-coded LLM horror so you can check that business box may leave you with code that’s not only especially buggy but RAM-hungry and CPU-hungry. And sure that’s expensive to deploy. But hey: your cloud spend is already preposterous, right? And high deployment costs are more predictable than high development costs…right?

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I can easily imagine scenarios where huge swaths of guts-of-the-business software increase their resource needs in production by an order of magnitude, •and• where businesses are perfectly happy to pay that cost.

That’s a story with horrifying environmental costs.

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