Code Is Twenty Percent of the Thing

From the Travel Tech Podcast newsletter for episode 36, Code Is Twenty Percent of the Thing.

Every week, someone asks a travel software agency why they can't just vibe code the platform themselves. The honest answer came from a team that recently spent five days debating a single custom fields feature before building any of it. For the 30,000+ of you building and buying systems across aviation and travel, that gap is the story right now, and I wanted it on the show.

So this episode brings back seven past guests who reached the same conclusion on their own. One grew a travel software agency and then built a platform for tour operators, one went from experimental aircraft design to airspace infrastructure for drones, one flew commercial jets before building AI for the cockpit, and one had never written a line of code until February 2025. Listen on Apple Podcasts, also streaming on Spotify and YouTube.

The fault line running through all of it: AI collapsed the cost of writing code, but almost nobody has priced in how small a share of the job the code ever was.

The 80% that never got cheaper

That tension has a structural cause. Travel systems are mostly encoded judgment: which fields a tour operator needs, how a rebooking should behave when the aircraft swaps, where an international fare can be broken to save a customer thousands. In airline operations those seams show up every day, and the knowledge to handle them has historically lived in people rather than code, like the corporate travel fare specialists who routinely beat the GDS pricing engine by hand.

AI now compresses the part that was always cheapest. A founder with no coding background can ship a working travel product, and a CEO can turn a paper scribble into a finished slide in a couple of iterations. Where it stalls is specification: one guest puts code at roughly 20% of a CRM, ERP, or GDS, and the other 80% is process and domain knowledge that still has to be argued out case by case.

In this episode I bring back Alex Ragin (Zoftify and Tourseta), Amit Ganjoo (ANRA Technologies), Leo Kotil (Overwatch AI), Jim Hetzel (TWAI), Íñigo Valenzuela (Smartvel), Christopher Olivares (Elyo), and Iñaki Uriz (Caravelo) to cover the limits of vibe coding, why complex systems fail at the seams, the lost art of fare construction, where value moves when code is free, and what the job becomes once execution is cheap.

Key Takeaways

• Specification is the bottleneck: The cost of a feature now sits in defining its edge cases, not in writing the code that handles them.
• Vibe coding has a ceiling: Single purpose tools like invoice generators are buildable, but a GDS or tour operator ERP is mostly operational knowledge.
• Test the seams, not the happy path: Integrated aviation systems fail at their interfaces, which is exactly where lab testing looks least.
• Domain expertise is the moat: Fare construction skill, knowledge of customer pain, and position in the journey are harder to copy than any codebase.
• Judgment is the job: With execution nearly free, deciding what to build and why is now the core work for every team, not only well funded ones.

Alex Brooker, Host of the Travel Tech Podcast, Founder of Airside Labs