Everyone Can Ship Now. Few Can Maintain It.

AI didn't just make coding easier. It opened the floodgates, and I'm starting to see what's washing in.

I published an app on Shopify recently and got a warning I now see everywhere: the marketplace is overcrowded. Same story on the iOS App Store and Google Play. A wave of near-identical apps, most of them built by people who heard "AI can make you money" and jumped in without ever learning to code.

The flood is real

It is not just apps. Reverse-engineering repos are circulating on GitHub that let anyone clone someone else's product overnight. The thing you spent months building can be copied by a stranger in an afternoon.

Here is roughly what I keep running into:

• App stores are flooding. iOS and Play are buried under clones that all do the same thing.
• Marketplaces are saturated. Shopify and plugin stores now openly warn about app overload.
• Revenue chasers with no fundamentals. People shipping by prompt what they cannot debug, secure, or scale.
• Clones on tap. Original work gets reverse-engineered and re-listed within days.

Who this actually hurts

In the short term, this genuinely hurts people. Experienced developers and freelancers who spent years building real skill are now competing against an ocean of cheap, AI-generated noise. Clients cannot always tell the difference yet, so good work gets buried under sheer volume.

That part is worth saying plainly, because a lot of "AI is amazing" content skips over it. The noise has a cost, and right now other people are paying it.

Where I think this goes

AI raised the floor, not the ceiling. It made starting easy. It did nothing to make finishing easy.

These apps ship fast and break faster. And when they break, the person who "built" it by prompting cannot debug it, cannot secure it, cannot scale it, and cannot maintain it.

That is the moment the flood clears. The market gets saturated, then it gets filtered.

What survives the filter is the stuff AI cannot fake: real depth, security, the ability to fix things under pressure, and the trust you earn by still being there when the thing breaks at 2am.

The takeaway

I am not worried about AI replacing skilled developers. I am worried about the noise it creates in the meantime. The builders who keep learning the fundamentals, who understand what they ship, come out of this more valuable, not less.

Anyone can ship now. Few can sustain it. That gap is the whole career.

So I will put the question back to you: in your corner of the market, is the flood hurting you, or sharpening you?