Somebody I know spent twelve days building a tool to check if domain names were available. Domain registrars do that for free (it’s their whole business model, they WANT you to find a name). When I asked how much time the tool saved, the answer was “several hours.” Twelve days in. Several hours out. And that, friends, is the era we just walked into.

AI made building almost free. Ideation, prototypes, a working tool by Thursday… “could” is now a commodity. Nobody mentions that “should” still costs exactly what it did in 1959, which happens to be the year we built the first machine that said yes. It was called COBOL, it was pitched as plain English for business people, and cleaning up after four decades of its enthusiasm cost the planet somewhere north of $300 billion. Ask me how I know (I was there for the Y2K part, badly caffeinated, at a bank).

This one’s for the software leaders. There’s an airline that ran ticketing on Access databases. A $20,000 AI-built report that replaces five minutes of work a week (the payback period will outlive everyone involved). A company that burned $500 million in tokens in a single month because nobody set a usage cap. And the part your finance folks already suspect: enterprise AI is not $200 a month, and the vendors are actively kicking business users off the subsidized plans.

Then the useful bit: the three questions I ask before any internal build gets a green light, and the guardrail system I rolled out so citizen developers can run without anyone getting run over.

Could you build it? Obviously. Should you? Listen first. Then forward this to whoever on your team just discovered agentic coding. Before the invoice does.