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Code Is Twenty Percent of the Thing
AI made writing code nearly free. But what if code was only ever 20% of the job? Host Alex Brooker pulls together seven guests from across travel software, airspace infrastructure, airline operations, corporate travel, destination content, and airline ancillaries who each arrived at that same conclusion independently, unpacking what lives in the other 80% and where advantage moves when execution costs almost nothing.
Show Notes
In this compilation episode, host Alex Brooker surfaces a single idea that seven guests reached independently from completely different corners of travel and aviation: code is roughly 20% of a complex software product, and the remaining 80% is domain knowledge, process, and judgment. Alex Ragin of travel software agency Zoftify and tour operator platform Tourseta opens with the number itself, illustrating it through a deceptively simple custom fields feature that consumed five days of internal and client discussion before a line was written. Amit Ganjoo, whose career spans experimental aircraft design to UAS traffic management at ANRA Technologies, adds that complex systems don't fail at the center. They fail at the seams, at the edge cases no happy path test ever reaches. Former commercial pilot and Overwatch AI founder Leo Kotil grounds that in airline operations, where disruption is the normal state and the non standard event is what crews must be equipped to handle. Jim Hetzel, now working on retailing strategy at TWAI, recalls the international pricing specialists at his first corporate travel agency who could save thousands of dollars on a ticket by knowing where to break a fare in ways the GDS pricing engine never could. Íñigo Valenzuela of destination content platform Smartvel argues that as development costs approach zero, value shifts to network effects, knowledge of customer pain, and position in the customer journey. Christopher Olivares, who had never written a line of code before building his travel product Elyo with ChatGPT in early 2025, shows the other side is real, since the 20% genuinely collapsed, while Iñaki Uriz of airline subscription platform Caravelo closes by naming what that leaves: deciding what to build, and why, is now the whole job for every team, not just the well funded ones.
Click to expand the full episode transcript (2,203 words approx.)
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About the Travel Tech Podcast
Hosted by Alex Brooker, founder of Airside Labs, the Travel Tech Podcast features authentic long-form conversations with leaders, innovators, and startup founders shaping the future of aviation and travel technology. No scripts, no sponsors, no sales pitches — just real conversations about building technology that matters.