By Pablo Revale
March 3, 2026 · 3 Minutes
Adapted from Originally published in Unstoppable Hospitality on LinkedIn.
600 years ago, Gutenberg invented the press and changed the world. Before the press, there were 30,000 books in Europe. Fifty years after the press, 20 million were printed. We are seeing a similar pattern nowadays. This was the analogy with the AI revolution that Boris Cherny, the head of Claude Code at Anthropic, commented on in Lenny’s Podcast. He nailed it. We have entered a new era of technology: unprecedented speed, autonomy, and unknown projections about the future. Five years ago, everyone recommended teenagers learn to code. Nowadays, almost every tech person is 99% sure coding will not be needed anymore. Everyone can produce code now, but can we actually solve problems? More code doesn’t mean better products but often more noise. However, more creators will produce, by pure probability, some amazing new products.
The hard part of building great hospitality technology was never writing the code. It was understanding the problem deeply enough to know what to build. I may be biased because I run a software agency, but trust me, if writing the code were always the hard part, I would have run tons of other businesses because I could have managed to write the code.
In hospitality, this is everything. The booking engine that underperforms isn’t broken just because the code is bad. It’s not delivering the expected results because nobody mapped the actual guest decision journey, the rate parity rules create invisible friction, the legacy PMS integration sends stale availability data, and the revenue team’s pricing strategy contradicts the UX flow. You still need someone who knows which one to fix first, and why. But if anyone can generate code, then code itself becomes a commodity. What becomes premium? Domain expertise: understanding the product ecosystem and how to consume specific data from each one. Product expertise: understanding why a guest abandons a booking at step 3, not just how to rebuild the checkout flow. Problem definition: the ability to ask the right question before generating anything. Quality judgment: someone who can look at AI-generated output and know whether it actually solves the problem or just looks like it does. Integration thinking: hospitality runs on interconnected systems, and knowing how they all fit together is the hard part.
We’ll see a wave of AI-generated hospitality tech products. New booking engines, new guest messaging tools, new revenue dashboards. Most of them will be mediocre because they were built to demonstrate capability, not to solve a specific problem. The winners will be the clearest thinkers, not the fastest coders. Vertical integration will matter more than ever. When code is cheap, competitive advantage comes from owning the data, the relationships, and the domain knowledge that AI can’t easily replicate. The software engineer role will change to product or business engineer. Boris Cherny says coding is solved. I’ll take it a step further: coding was never the hard part if your company wasn’t in the deep tech space. The printing press didn’t make everyone a great author. But it made authorship cheap and distribution instant. That allowed thousands of people to become authors. My question for hospitality leaders is: are we going to wait for others to become authors of our saga, or will we write it ourselves?
Lenny’s Podcast: Head of Claude Code, What Happens After Coding Is Solved, with Boris Cherny. Fortune: Software Engineers May Not Exist by Year End. Bloomberg: AI Coding Agents Fueling a Productivity Panic in Tech. The New Stack: 5 Key Trends Shaping Agentic Development in 2026. GitHub Octoverse.
