When The Moat Drains

For decades, software companies competed by digging moats. Better UX. Wider feature sets. Polished design systems. Each one denominated in time and dollars (i.e., months of labor, millions in spend). However, they were only moats because they were expensive.

That's changing fast.

When AI drops the cost and timelines of building software by 100x, every moat becomes a puddle. The design you spent a quarter perfecting gets cloned before lunch. The feature set that took two teams and six sprints gets generated by a competitor over coffee. What took you months now takes someone else minutes.

You can't differentiate on something anyone can replicate for free.

There's a whole vocabulary in tech - design systems, feature parity, UX polish - that we've treated as competitive advantage for so long it feels structural. It's not. It never was. It was just expensive. And expensive used to be enough.

So what actually holds when construction costs hit near-zero?
Not what you build. What you know. 

Proprietary data. Deep customer relationships. Taste and judgment that compound over years, not sprints. Network effects that grow with every user. Trust that no model can generate.

Code is no longer a moat. Context is.