Simon Wardley

Simon Wardley created Wardley Mapping after costly strategic errors he attributed to having no map of the landscape. The method puts a value chain on the vertical axis, running from the user's need down to dependencies nobody sees (the electricity behind the oven that bakes the pizza), and evolution on the horizontal: genesis, custom-built, product, commodity. From that comes a compact decision rule: build the unique, buy the product, use the commodity. Position on the evolution axis is where the strategic reading happens. "Build a website" was a pioneering act in 1994 and is often a waste of time and money today.

The same reading of predictable evolution drives his answer, in a fictional socratic dialogue dated 2026-03-27, to whether LLMs and vibe coding mean more or fewer developers. Roughly the same number, he argues, because of the Red Queen effect: competing firms reinvest every productivity gain immediately just to hold position. He predicts large enterprises moving from 30 million to more than a billion lines of code. Jevons paradox supplies his frame, since a resource that gets cheaper to use gets consumed more. His analogy is the sysadmin, who did not vanish when virtualization killed physical racking but became a DevOps engineer or an SRE.

Wardley states that reading the code is already unsustainable at scale, and wants software engineering to move from craft to engineering discipline. He recommends retraining over layoffs, then predicts companies will not choose it.