Software development & consulting · 2026–2036

The artifact got cheap. The accountability didn’t.

A ten-year timeline for two professions being reshaped by one force: the cost of producing the artifact — code, decks, analysis — is falling fast, while the cost of specifying, verifying, and taking accountability for outcomes stays high or rises. Where verification is cheap, disruption is fast. Where it is expensive, humans hold.

Cheaper is not free: agent fleets, multi-step workflows, and frontier-model inference remain a real cost line for the foreseeable future. This is a report about a relative shift.

2026 2028 2030 2032 2034 2036 Phase 0 · Now-state adoption universal, value uneven Phase 1 · 2027–28 co-ownership, spec-to-deploy Phase 2 · 2029–31 the bottleneck window Phase 3 · 2032–36 speculative — ranges, not points

The claims audit — what held, what needed revision → The dashboard — nine numbers that re-price this note →