AI made code cheap. It didn't make quality cheap.

The price of writing software has collapsed. In three years, the part everyone assumed was the expensive bit — actually writing the code — has become the cheap one: a capable AI model now drafts in minutes what once took a development team a week. We use these tools every day, gladly, and this is not a warning about them.

But a price collapse in one half of a product tends to hide what happened to the other half. And the other half of software was never the typing.

The expensive part was never the code

In twenty-five years of building business software, the hard questions have never been "can we write this?" They are the quieter ones. Is it secure? Can one client ever see another client's records? Will the numbers still balance after next month's changes? Who checked, and how would you know?

Answering those questions was always the real cost of software. AI has not touched that cost. If anything it has raised it, because there is now far more code, produced far faster, by a process that does not naturally stop to check its own work.

What the research shows

This is no longer a hunch; it is measured. Veracode's 2026 GenAI Code Security Report, which tested more than a hundred AI models, found that AI-generated code passed its security tests just 56% of the time, a figure essentially unchanged in a year, while the same code was syntactically correct in over 95% of cases. Around four in ten code-generation tasks introduced a known class of security flaw. Their conclusion, in their own words: the models are getting smarter, but not safer.

GitClear's research into more than 200 million changed lines of code tells the maintainability half of the story: a fourfold growth in copy-pasted code clones, while refactoring — the careful reworking that keeps a system healthy — fell from around 24% of changed lines in 2020 to under 10% in 2024. Codebases are growing faster, and ageing faster, at the same time.

In plain terms: AI-written software looks finished more convincingly than any software in history, and "looks finished" has never been further from "is right".

What this means if you are buying software

The market is filling with software that was cheap to produce. Two systems can demonstrate identically in a sales call. One of them carries flaws that nobody has looked for, in code that nobody plans to maintain.

So the question to put to anyone building for you has changed. "Can you build it?" is settled; nearly anyone can build it now. The question that matters is: "How do you know it is right — and can you show me?" If the answer is a promise about being careful, you have learned something important.

How we spend the savings

We rebuilt our delivery around exactly that question. Every system we build comes off one central platform that we audit and test in one place. Every change to it, including our own, passes four machine-run inspections before it can ship: security scanning; a test that proves one client's records cannot be reached from another client's account; accessibility checks; and bespoke code held inside declared, checkable limits. Fail one, and nothing ships. There is no override.

Just as important, the evidence is generated rather than promised. A project specification produced from the running system itself, so it cannot drift from reality. A conformance report with every build: security, data protection and accessibility evidence you can hand to a board, an auditor or an insurer. And every component the software is built from, audited daily against newly published vulnerabilities.

The first morning that daily audit ran across our systems, it flagged six real vulnerabilities that had just been published in widely used components. The fixes were live the same day, each one on the record. That is the routine doing its job.

Cheap code is a gift, if you bank it properly

AI made code cheap, and we are glad of it: it is why we can deliver working business systems in weeks, at a fixed price agreed before we start. But we spend those savings on the part that was never cheap: proving the software right, and handing you the proof.

That is the trade we think business software should make. And it is one you can now reasonably demand from anyone who builds for you.

See what machine-checked looks like in a working system: book a discovery call. Half an hour, no charge, and we will tell you plainly whether we are worth your money.