AI's low cost makes judgment the new core development constraint.

Arpit Bhayani

Arpit Bhayani

Jul 13, 2026 • 1 min read


AI has brought the cost of development close to zero. That should make building easier. It actually makes it harder. When anything can be built, the constraint has shifted to judgment (from time or resources).

Yes, clock the 120-hour weeks if that is what it takes. But that effort only counts if it moves in one direction. Motion does not mean progress, and hence hours of work in different directions make the vectors nullify :)

It does not matter what level in the corporate hierarchy you operate at; learning to say no is the actual skill. At least put forth your opinion. At least it will make leadership think a bit more, or teach you a new mental model of decision-making.

I feel judgment will separate the teams that build something real from the teams that just build a lot.

Hope this helps.

Arpit Bhayani

Principal Engineer II at Razorpay - building Agent Studio, Ex-staff engg at GCP Memorystore & Dataproc, Creator of DiceDB, ex-Amazon Fast Data, ex-Director of Engg. SRE and Data Engineering at Unacademy. I spark engineering curiosity through my no-fluff engineering videos on YouTube and my courses