The Value of Code
2026-10-25
A while ago, someone asked me a simple question: what is the value of code?
I didn’t have a clean answer then. I do have one now, or at least the beginning of one. This is my first blog post, and writing it is partly the point. I’m writing it inspired by SVS, whose way of thinking about careers and building things has shaped how I see my own. At a recent meetup, I was nudged to start writing, and the reason makes sense to me: writing forces you to think clearly. If you can’t put an idea on a page without it falling apart, you don’t understand it yet.
Here is the post I shared after that meetup:
So let me think out loud.
The business answer
My first instinct was this: the value of code is directly proportional to the business impact it creates.
A thousand lines that nobody uses are worth nothing. Ten lines that remove a bottleneck, save a team a week of work, or let a company sell something it couldn’t sell before can be worth a great deal. Code is not valuable because it exists or because it is clever. It is valuable because of what it changes in the world.
That sounds cold, so here is the other half.
The fun answer
Plenty of people write code with no business case at all. They do it because it is fun, because the puzzle is satisfying, because they want to see whether they can.
And sometimes those two answers meet. When you contribute to the Linux kernel, your code ends up running on billions of devices and servers around the world. Nobody sat down and wrote a business plan for that. A lot of it started as curiosity and grew into something the world quietly depends on.
This is why I love open source. You can sit anywhere, open a codebase, and start working alongside people from across the globe. You learn how real systems are built, you get your thinking reviewed by strangers who owe you nothing, and you meet people you would never have met otherwise. Linus Torvalds put the culture in one line:
“Talk is cheap. Show me the code.”
Open source is where that line is taken seriously.
What I learned from looking at how companies make money
Lately I’ve been reading about startups and trying to understand how money actually moves through a business: cash flow, funding, and where the margins come from.
On one side, you have venture capital. VCs back pre-seed companies that have a chance of growing very large. They know most will fail, and they are paying for the few that don’t. On the other side, you have owner-run companies, such as private limited companies, that own everything and grow slowly on whatever they earn.
Many of these companies are service businesses. Some have strong processes. Many don’t. And what they all tend to do, to win work, is sell their services cheaply.
Here is a simple example. Say an engineer is worth 10 LPA in the market. The company pays them 6 LPA and bills the client for their work as if they were worth 20. The gap in the middle is the business model. That isn’t evil, and it’s how services work everywhere. But it has a consequence: the person who creates the value captures the smallest slice of it.
And the barrier to entry is low. How long does it take to start a service company? How long does it take to open a sweet shop? Not long. Anyone can do it, so everyone competes on price, and the price goes down. A business that competes only on being cheaper is always one cheaper competitor away from trouble.
Money, self-respect and ego
Of course money matters. At the end of the day, it does. I’m not going to pretend otherwise.
But I think there is a price you should not pay for it, and that price is your self-respect. I’ve been trying to understand the difference between self-respect and ego, because people often mix them up.
Ego is refusing to accept that you don’t know something, especially when the person telling you is someone you think you are better than.
Self-respect is knowing when you are in a place where you are not valued enough, and having the courage to walk away from it.
One closes you off. The other keeps you honest. Ego says “I already know.” Self-respect says “I am worth more than this, and I’m willing to earn it.”
Engineering is about innovation
This is the part I care about most. Everyone talks about innovation. Very few people actually contribute to it.
And innovation is not just writing code. It can be a robotic arm. It can be AI research. It can be an independent AI lab. There are people willing to put real money behind anyone who is solving something for humanity and moving it forward. It is a rare thing to find work that is both meaningful and fundable, and I’m excited about it.
I’m also not scared of AI. I understand the worry, with all the headlines about AI doing this and AI doing that. But I find it more useful to ask a different question: what can I build with it?
Richard Feynman had a sentence on his blackboard when he died:
“What I cannot create, I do not understand.”
I think about it all the time. I want to understand how things work, and the only way I know to do that is to build them.
Everyone wants to make money, and so do I. But I want to create an impact large enough to outlive me. It could be a research paper. It could be a tool. It could be something I can’t even imagine yet. Something that is still useful to people after I am gone.
So, what is the value of code?
For me, it was never about the code. It was about engineering. It was about building things, ideally things that help people.
I know AI has made building much easier. Anyone can now produce a working app in an afternoon, and I think that’s wonderful. But it also moves the hard part somewhere else. When writing code gets cheap, the things that stay valuable are judgment and taste: knowing what is worth building, what to leave out, and when something is good enough or not.
So the skill to protect is not typing. It’s deciding.
I believe engineering will stay in demand. No one can remove the need for people who build. I want to work with those engineers, the ones who care about the thing they are making and the people who will use it.
The most useful advice I’ve found, from Marcus Aurelius, is this:
“The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”
Stay focused on building, and not on the obstacles. Don’t stay stuck on the solution you imagined; stay on the problem, and keep going.
That’s my answer for now. It may change. That’s one more reason to keep writing.