> When creation was hard, skill was the differentiator: you had to actually be good to make something worth showing. Now the barrier is near zero, so you need reach. Reach costs money or it costs years. Probably both.

Creation has progressively been getting easier since the invention of the computer, it is not a new phenomena. This naturally pushes the boundary on what needs to be delivered in order to find paying customers. In other words, creation still is "hard" if you want to succeed.

> I launched something last week. 14 people signed up — no ads, just a couple of posts. 14 real people who didn't have to. That number is tiny and it felt like something. Then I sat down to think about what it would take to grow it and I couldn't look at that math for very long.

This applies to 90+% of founders that have ever launched something. The hard part comes from continuing to push forward when you experience this (which you will over and over). It sounds like the author expects that what was hard suddenly should be easy.

This AI boom is just a hyper-version of previous tech booms (web 1.0, VC, crypto, etc). You have an enormous number of people who just want to get in and build something, but the products they are pumping out don't serve anyone's need or solve anyone's problem.

The moat isn't money for out-marketing your idea that 750 other people are building, it's having a good idea that solves a problem that nobody else is solving well.

I disagree. I think creativity is still a valid moat. You still need to build good products. Its like a restaurant anyone with some money can open a restaurant but you need to has the creativity to make a good one.

I appreciate the conversation the post initiates.

Nevertheless, by counter-example -- OpenClaw's creator was just recruited by people with more capital than countries. If they could "re-produce" him with their capital, they would've preferred that.

Whatever he has, is still a moat. What that is, is debatable.

Is it brand? Is it his creativity? Is it trust/autheticity? A vision?

All those are perceived moats (or risks) by these folks that tried to scoop him up.

I think there's still value in building quality products, but AI makes it easy to build something that appears good but doesn't actually work that well. It's very difficult to communicate the thought and intentionality that went into a well-designed product in a way that stands out amongst the noise.

I think the other moat is access to non-public data. If you can train, measure, or make decisions based on specific data that the vibecoder trying to clone you can't get, you can keep ahead.

Doing hard things has always been, and always will be, hard.

Building a static HTML page was “hard” in the 90’s. It took actual skills.

Any piece that gets easier automatically opens up more hard avenues to tackle.

no one is willing to pay you for easy.

> Reach costs money or it costs years. Probably both.

Leaving the rotating get-rich-quick bubbles that seem to be consuming more and more of our collective attention (sidebar: is this because assets seem more difficult to attain through labour alone?), it always took time.

Part of the problem now is that it doesn't take time. Someone can present 100k or 1M LoC for which they've invested very little effort, which is great but provides no guarantees about the future of that project.

The average business is halfway through its life. It's rational to ignore these sandcastles of technical debt because they have no foundation in sweat and/or tears and will disappear just as quickly as they arrived.

looks like the real tension here is that "money" and "reach" aren't quite the same moat though. I think the post kind of conflates them. existing audience is the actual barrier - money can buy ads but it can't buy trust or distribution, not quickly anyway

the gravitational threshold thing is real ngl. I've seen the same dynamic in product launches - identical quality, completely different outcomes based on whether you're already above the line or not. that part holds up

not sure the "creativity is the moat" counterargument fully lands either. yeah taste matters, but AstroBen's point is valid - anything that gets traction gets cloned basically immediately now. so creativity gets you first mover advantage for like... a week?

maybe the actual moat is just community? people who already trust you before you ship. which is a form of reach I guess, so kind of proves the point

The well is drying. You have less money available for hustling and less small players with money. With layoffs happening everywhere you have more people with ambition and time on their hands, but less of them can afford big expenses or major risks.

The hype machine currently pushing for agents is selling agents ability to do automated marketing. However the bigger companies know better than to create giant security holes and the small players are either not technically skilled, or will balk at the huge per-use fees for the good models, or will be drowned out because of low quality cheap model output.

I disagree. Customer relationships, taste, creativity, tenacity, execution excellence, industry relevance, reputation, etc... are all hard earned or intrinsic capabilities that matter a lot more than feature development speed/cost.

> The people winning mostly had a head start. Or they have money. Usually both.

It feels like that doesn't it? But, as one counter-point, OpenClaw. :)

Btw I did a deep-dive into AI moats last week and wrote a blog post about it. Relationships were most likely the strongest moat from my research - but definitely having a large amount of money in reserves helps. https://www.cjroth.com/blog/2026-02-11-moats-in-the-age-of-a...

> The value of human thinking is going down.

Wrong. Creativity, innovation, intuition, taste - all forms of thought solely inherent to humans, all going up.

I liked the part about attention being the scarce resource now. Everyone is competing for your attention. But then I see a world in which openclaw is managing emails for people and searching the internet for them and shopping in their behalf. How long until we start seeing advertising specifically targeting AI instead of humans?

There is an old word for it: saturation.

And let's be honest that's not a new thing. It's been already a long time since you had a revolutionary idea in the shower only to google it(or use an LLM nowadays) and discover that there are already eight different apps that do what you were thinking.

"The value of human thinking is going down."

No! I fundamentally reject this.

The value of unoriginal thinking has gone down. Thinking which is quotidian and pedestrian has become even more worthless than it already was.

The value of true, original human thinking has gone up even higher than it ever has been.

Do we think no new companies will ever succeed now? Of course not. Who, then, will succeed? It will be innovators and original thinkers and those with excellent taste.

Why did stripe make big inroads in developer spaces even if they are in an ultra competitive low margin market? They had excellent taste in developer ergonomics. They won big not because they coded well or fast (though I know pc thinks their speed is a big factor, I think he is mostly incorrect on that) but because they had an actual sense of originality and propriety to their approach! And it resonated.

So many other products are similar. You can massively disrupt a space simply by having an original angle on it that nobody else has had. Look at video games! Perhaps the best example of this is how utterly horribly AAA games have been doing, while indie hits produce instantly timeless entries.

And soon this will be the ONLY thing that still differentiates. Artistic propriety, originality, and taste.

(And, of course, the ever-elusive ability to actually execute that I also don't think LLMs will help with.)

Have people naturally started sounding like an LLM when they write and talk? To me this article reads not fully human.

> When creation was hard, skill was the differentiator I don't think people use things because they are hard to make

>Every morning a few thousand people wake up and ship something. A tool, a SaaS, a newsletter, an app that does the thing the other app does but slightly differently. They post it on Hacker News. Nobody clicks.

>This is not new. What's new is the scale. An AI can wake up (or whatever it does at 3am) and ship twelve of these before breakfast.

That's fun, I'm sure if somebody actually checked that and graphed it, you would not be able to pinpoint when AI starts on the graph

Difficulty is the only true moat. [Astronaut: always has been]

Current examples: esoteric calculations that are not public knowledge; historical data that you collected and someone else didn't; valuable proprietary data; having good taste; having insider knowledge of a niche industry; making physical things; attracting an audience.

Some things that were recently difficult are now easy, but general perception has not caught up. That means there's arbitrage—you can charge the old prices for creating a web app, but execute it in a day. But this arbitrage will not last forever; we will see downward price pressure on anything that is newly easy. So my advice is: take advantage now.

I saw Peter Steinberger whose creativity is huge and made a difference. Yeah you can say he's already rich.

But I also saw many people like him including the author of Flask. Also the author of XcodeBuildMcp, tailwindcss

While building has becomes way cheaper (and probably is going to become even cheaper in the future), is building something exceptional really that much cheaper now?

AI has certainly made it so much simpler to just pump "something" out (slop), but did it actually make building something that went through hundreds and thousands of iterations significantly cheaper?

I also like to think AI is really raising the bar for everybody. In the past, you could easily get away launching a product with a crappy landing page and a couple of bugs here and there, is that still the case? Don't people just expect a perfect landing page at this point (when's the last time anybody specifically talked/ thought about responsiveness?) paired with a flawless onboarding etc.?

I hope this is true, I'm trying to make a multi-agent orchestration thing that looks at grain futures, satellite imagery, news, etc... to trade crypto. I'll probably lose but yeah.

Maybe the guy doing their 9-5 can run many agents to make them money while they work their day job.

Is that a thing, you get hired at some company then you use an agent to work for you, deep fake video calls, cursor code... that would be crazy. Get another job and split your time between agents for minor corrections.

Welp guess I’m done then.

Kind of nice to know I don’t have to blame myself anymore.

I'm no big fan of economists - but if some type of business is seen as highly desirable to be in, and has minimal barriers to entry, then the market will soon be saturated. Expecting otherwise is (at best) wishful thinking.

People here saying creativity or having a good idea is the moat

You know that if anything you build gets traction, it'll be cloned by 100 people, right?

So this is what the VCs were screaming about this bullshit about "abundance".

Abundance of copy cats that cannot make any money as prices are raced to zero.

Doom and gloom nonsense.

what about the water filled ditches surrounding castles? They're left too!

Capitalism working as intended, shifting more and more resources to the already-rich.

A handful of people doesn't own most of the country by accident.