AI is making coding cheaper.
That does not mean building the right thing has become easy.
A warts-and-all field report for founders, consultants, and business owners trying to understand what AI really changes about software work, judgment, and value.
Not selling hype. Honest field notes from inside the shift.
Hi, I'm Marcus Povey from Practical Alchemy.
I've led software teams building real scientific software, with decades of practical experience. I run a long-running blog on software, open source, and technology, and I'm actively using AI in workplace tools and workflows today.
This book is an exploratory, honest account of what happens when AI stops being a novelty and starts changing how we buy, sell, manage, and build technical work. It is not a pretend universal framework from a fake mountaintop.
Businesses are adopting AI faster than they understand it.
Code, copy, analysis, and implementation are becoming easier to generate. But founders and consultants still need to know what is worth building, what is safe to trust, and where human judgment still matters. The danger is not that AI writes code—the danger is that organisations mistake code-shaped output for software capability.
For founders, consultants, and business owners.
Understand which skills are becoming commoditised and which are becoming more valuable. Learn from real experiments, failures, and shifts in how software work is bought, sold, and managed.
A breakdown of the real-world impact of AI on teams and businesses.
The gap between demos and production reality, and what happens when coding becomes cheap.
How to introduce AI into a real team: bounding use cases, defining risk, and building review habits.
Less blank-page implementation; more decomposition, orchestration, review, and integration.
What to let go of, and what to protect: system understanding, taste, and the ability to simplify.
When AI goes wrong: confident nonsense, plausible but wrong architecture, and security gaps.
The uncomfortable shift from selling implementation to selling judgment and strategy.
If this transition is already happening inside your business, I am interested in talking to founders and teams navigating it now.