AI made building cheap. It made alignment more expensive, not less

AI collapsed the cost of producing code. It did nothing to the cost of agreeing what the code should be derived from.

The domain model. The boundaries. The invariants that hold across every feature. Those still have to be argued out by people who understand the business. An agent can draft them. It cannot relieve you of agreeing on them.

So alignment does not disappear when building gets cheap. It relocates. It moves to the shared account that everything downstream inherits.

The teams that feel fastest right now are often generating code against an account nobody aligned on. They are not saving the alignment cost. They are deferring it. And deferred alignment compounds.

What used to be a slow build is now a fast build on an unexamined foundation. The bill arrives later, in rework, in drift, in systems nobody can change with confidence.

Cheap building raised the value of expensive alignment. Not the other way around.