Introducing the series

What the Age of the Builder is arguing about

Saif Sarwar · August 2026

A reading of the current debate on cheap software, and where a four-part series on education infrastructure sits inside it.

A trust with six schools can now commission a working attendance dashboard in a fortnight, for the cost of a supply teacher's week. Ten years ago that was a procurement cycle, a supplier, and a three-year contract. The build got cheap. The contract, the data rights, the evaluation and the board minute did not change at all.

That gap is what this series is about, and this piece sets out the argument it is entering, the positions already held in it, and what four essays of field research add that is not already on the table.

The debate as it stands

Two readings of cheap software

The optimistic reading is one of access. Assisted coding removes the programming prerequisite, so the person who understands the problem can build for it directly. The Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2024 found 76 per cent of respondents using or planning to use AI coding tools in their work, which is adoption at a speed few general-purpose technologies have matched. In education the implication is a domain expert — a head of maths, a SENCO, an attendance lead — producing the thing they need rather than describing it to a vendor who will build it for someone else's school.