AI is collapsing the cost of producing software while simultaneously making the scarce layers more expensive. Coders who survive displacement aren't the ones who generate code faster; they're the ones who verify the output that got cheap. Enterprises aren't buying the cheapest model; they're paying a premium for the rate-limited one, because at this stage of the market, supply constraint functions as a trust signal. Users who benefit most from AI assistance are the same ones most anxious about depending on it: benefits and harms aren't opposing camps, they're tensions compounding inside the same person, the same team, the same purchasing decision. Commoditization was supposed to erode pricing power. Instead, it's revealing which layers were always underpriced.