AI Era: When Code is a Commodity But Product Taste Sets the Price
Key insights from How Human Exists panel on human skills in the AI era. When intelligence becomes cheap, taste and empathy remain our ultimate value.
Stock photo for illustration only, not from the actual event
- AI can write code better than 99.9% of programmers worldwide
- The true bottleneck is computational power rather than AI intelligence
- Product Taste and Empathy are irreplaceable human advantages
- True job security comes from continuous personal evolution
When artificial intelligence can write code more smoothly than 99.9% of programmers globally, where do humans stand? This critical question took center stage at the How Human Exists panel, featuring top industry minds including CK Cheong, CEO of Fastwork; Richard Armstrong, Partner and Head of Asia and US at TA Ventures; and Chutima Sriburomsas, Founder and CEO of Brightnest Studio, who gathered to examine how humans can create genuine value when knowledge and basic skills are processed by AI in seconds.
A massive transformation is underway across the tech industry. Designers no longer need to touch Figma, instead typing prompts into Cloud Code or Cursor to instantly generate prototypes. The traditional workflow where Product Managers write dozens of pages of requirements for designers, who then pass them to engineers, has completely died as job boundaries blur beyond recognition.
Stock photo for illustration only, not from the actual event
CK Cheong outlined how expectations for modern software engineers have completely reversed. Features that once took weeks to build are now compressed into three days, provided the backend remains free of accumulated tech debt. Meanwhile, investor Richard Armstrong confirmed that tech team budgets no longer focus on software costs, but rather on token consumption, allowing portfolio startups to shrink product development cycles from years down to just 1 to 2 weeks.
However, the real bottleneck for AI advancement is not system intelligence, but computational power. Silicon Valley lore notes that Sam Altman uses a new AI agent to review his nightly schedules because AI remembers everything humans forget. While power shortages prompt tech giants to race for gigawatts, Richard warned this bottleneck will soon pass. As compute scales and token costs drop, intelligence will become a cheap commodity available to anyone for pennies.
"ทุกคนได้วัตถุดิบชุดเดียวกัน กระทะใบเดียวกัน ใช้สูตรเดียวกันเป๊ะ แต่ผัดออกมาแล้วไม่มีทางรสชาติเหมือนกัน เพราะฝีมือและมุมมองของคนปรุงคือสิ่งที่ไม่เท่ากัน"
CK Cheong
The commoditization of AI models indicates that basic data processing and content generation will lose market value. Organizations and professionals relying solely on superficial AI prompting will lose their competitive edge. Value creation must shift toward experience design and strategic decision-making that genuinely requires human judgment and emotional intelligence.
When intelligence is no longer an advantage, the remaining X-factors are Taste and Empathy. CK compared it to cooking a local dish where everyone uses the exact same ingredients and recipe, yet the taste differs entirely because of the cook's skill and perspective. Since end consumers are still human, decision-making requires emotion, aesthetic taste, and common sense that algorithms can never replicate.
Source: Techsauce
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