A good chair's expensive? I don't agree.

I'm not talking about upper luxury products. I'm talking about good, maintainable business code or just something as basic as a polished, full-featured dashboard that contains no "silly" bugs.

That kind of thing is still not very cheap in the context an average person's typical expenses.

The chatGPT webapp is as example of something built to a budget (despite having a team with access to cutting edge AI); and it just doesn't feel good to use or to navigate around. Contrast that to Twitter's front-end. That took millions of dollars in designer/SWE salary to build and you can just tell how much better it is than the average social media platform, or any new webapp by a less experienced team.

Human in the loop prompting/steering/testing time is also not free, even if a $20 claude/chatgpt sub can theoretically build anything to an acceptable level. 2 days worth of a humans's time is still ~100 bucks. Very few harnesses can run fully autonomously and still end up with usable software unless you're someone who specializes in working with these things.

Production level code is really not as cheap as you imagine it to be.