Code Used to Be a Moat
The economic protection of software was always reproduction cost. AI collapses that cost. Any business whose moat depended on software being expensive to reproduce is now structurally exposed.
The Typewriter Defense
Atlassian won’t vanish overnight—but inertia isn’t a moat. In an agentic world where software is cheap and specs replace tickets, workflow tools built for human task tracking face structural risk. The need for coordination remains. The shape of it doesn’t.
The Agentive Product Stack: How the Layers Compose
The taxonomy describes roles. Products of Consequence, Judgment, Counsel, Action. Four categories, four different jobs.
But products don't
Planning in the Agentive Era
Agentic dev breaks planning. Work finishes before tickets get written. Estimates don't apply. But orgs still need dates. The fix: plan outcomes, not tasks. Artifact in the repo where agents read it. Ranges, not commitments. Most orgs aren't ready. Figuring it out live.
Humility breeds success
Self-awareness is a form of self-knowledge that emerges when you know your strengths as well as your weaknesses. A self-aware leader knows when he can succeed as well as when he's licked. Such a leader has the strength of character to step aside in favor of a better alternative.
The Mastery Gap
What the Industrial Revolution Tells Us About the Junior Engineer Crisis
The anxiety running through engineering right now has a
The Cockpit Has to Change Too
We optimized our work environment for humans writing code. Now we need to optimize for humans orchestrating agents. Monitors, voice tools, PR queues, the boring infrastructure nobody's talking about. That's how you know we're early.
The Junior Engineer Paradox
Engineering capability was earned through friction. You wrestled with syntax. You paged at 2 a.m. You learned why certain patterns were bad because you lived inside their failure modes. That friction is gone. But the struggle isn't. It's simply moving up the stack.
What AI-Powered Development Requires from Leadership
In the agentic era, execution is cheap but decision latency kills velocity. The solution isn't more coordination—it's architectural strategy with enough logic density that engineers can make good calls independently. Duplication beats meetings. Build the framework before you unleash the agents.
GenAI Product Doctrine: Products of Counsel
Products of Counsel advise humans toward outcomes, not just answers. The moat isn't chat UI or data access—it's accumulated user context, domain judgment, and encoded expertise. Sycophancy and false confidence kill trust. Win by being worth believing, not by being liked.
