AI coding agents are getting frighteningly good, fast, and dirt cheap.
We're approaching a world where 95% of a codebase can be rewritten or refactored on demand. What does that mean for software development?

(My hot take)
It means coding is getting commoditized and Test-Driven Development is on the way out. When code is cheap, quality becomes your moat.

We talked to a lot of fast-growing companies that found PMF in the post AI coding era and they are at the stage of transitioning from "Prototype" mode to "Production" mode. What we learned is that we're seeing a fundamental shift in the economics of software development:

Code can now be generated, rewritten, or optimized at scale
Entire features can be rearchitected overnight
Engineering productivity is no longer the limiting factor

This breaks the assumptions behind traditional Test-Driven Development because writing and maintaining unit and integration tests assumes code changes are rare, manual and costly.

In a world where 95% of the codebase is fluid, maintaining brittle low-level unit and integration tests becomes a tax, not a safeguard. They're tightly coupled to structure, not outcomes. And structure can now change on a dime.

What replaces it?
Product-Driven Development.

In this new paradigm, the only quality gate that matters is the user experience.
The final contract is no longer between classes and functions, it's between product and user, delivered through the human-machine interface.

This creates an inflection point for software testing:

✅ End-to-end QA becomes the single source of truth and the last line of defense against user-facing errors
✅ QA demand surges as code velocity accelerates
✅ Legacy testing tools, built for static codebases, start to break down

At QualGent (YC X25), we're building the QA layer for this new era.
Our AI-powered QA agents test mobile apps like real users - not through brittle scripts, but through dynamic, intent-aware exploration of the interface.
Just as AI is reshaping how code is written, we're reshaping how quality is validated at the experience layer.

We believe the next breakout company in software infrastructure won't be another AI codegen tool.
It will be the one that ensures product quality at scale in an AI-native world.
That's the category we're building.

Join us in redefining software quality for the AI era. 👉 https://qualgent.ai/

Coding is getting commoditized, and Test-Driven Development is on the way out