Software’s next moat is taste
When competent code becomes abundant, deciding what deserves to exist becomes the scarce capability.
The cost of producing acceptable software is falling faster than the cost of understanding what people actually want. This does not make product work less important. It makes discernment the constraint.
The shift
The surface-level story is speed: more output, shorter cycles, lower production cost. The structural story is that the location of scarcity moves. Once an old constraint becomes cheap, the system reorganises around what is still difficult to obtain—context, judgement, authority, attention or trust.
That distinction matters because markets routinely overvalue the newly abundant thing during a transition. Capability is visible. Integration is quiet. Yet integration is where a possibility becomes a repeated behaviour and, eventually, an institution.
Where the leverage moves
Taste is not visual polish. It is the ability to remove a plausible feature, insist on the right default and recognise when convenience has begun to erode trust. Those decisions compound into a product that feels inevitable.
The practical response is not to chase every new capability. It is to identify which part of the value chain now moves faster, which part becomes newly defensible, and what kind of product can make that shift legible to a user. A good product is a theory of the new constraint made concrete.
The model to hold: capability diffuses; situated judgement compounds.
What I’m watching
As implementation speed converges, compare companies by the coherence of their exclusions. The roadmap will reveal more than the release cadence.
The most useful signals will not always arrive as announcements. They appear in changed pricing units, shrinking interfaces, new permission patterns and teams achieving outcomes that their organisational shape should not permit. Those are the moments when the future stops being a claim and starts becoming an operating fact.