In September 2026, major music publishers filed a detailed complaint against a leading AI lab and its founders personally, seeking substantial per-work damages over training data. It’s one of several suits working through the courts, and the broader signal is consistent: after two years of focus on model capability, the contested ground is shifting to data rights, provenance and human review.
By September 2026 the industry’s own framing had shifted: the value is in workflows, data rights and human review, not flashy demos. That’s a good moment to take stock of what has actually changed in how software gets built. It’s easy to be either dismissive or breathless about AI’s effect on software development, and both postures avoid the more useful question: what, specifically, is actually different about how software gets built today versus three years ago? A few concrete shifts are worth naming, separate from the marketing around them.