There is no moat. It's all prompts. The only potential moat is building your own specialized models using the code your customers send your way I believe.
I think "prompts" are a much richer kind of intellectual property than they are given credit for. Will put in here a pointer to the Odd Lots recent podcast with Noetica AI- a give to get M&A/complex debt/deal terms benchmarker. Noetica CEO said they now have over 1 billion "deal terms" in their database, which is only half a dozen years old. Growing constantly. Over 1 billion different legal points on which a complex financial contract might be structured. Even more than that, the representation of terms in contracts they see can change pretty dramatically quarter to quarter. The industry learns and changes.
The same thing is going to happen with all of the human language artifacts present in the agentic coding universe. Role definitions, skills, agentic loop prompts....the specific language, choice of words, sequence, etc really matters and will continue to evolve really rapidly, and there will be benchmarkers, I am sure of it, because quite a lot of orgs will consider their prompt artifacts to be IP.
I have personally found that a very high precision prompt will mean a smaller model on personal hardware will outperform a lazy prompt given to a foundation model. These word calculators are very very (very) sensitive. There will be gradations of quality among those who drive them best.
The best law firms are the best because they hire the best with (legal) language and are able to retain the reputation and pricing of the best. That is the moat. Same will be the case here.
But the problem is the tight coupling of prompts to the models. The half-life of prompt value is short because the frequency of new models is high, how do you defend a moat that can half (or worse) any day a new model comes out?
You might get an 80% “good enough” prompt easily but then all the differentiation (moat) is in that 20% but that 20% is tied to the model idiosyncrasies, making the moat fragile and volatile.
I think the issue was they (the parent commenter) didn't properly convey and/or did not realize they were arguing for context. Data that is difficult to come by that can be used in a prompt is valuable. Being able to workaround something with clever wording (i.e. prompt) is not a moat.
I used Django for a project a couple of years ago. Of course, there's a lot to learn. But generally I found that everything makes sense and I was able to build a moderately complex site with user accounts within a reasonable time. Work took me in different directions, but if a project came up I'd use it again, no problem.
Last year I taught myself Next.js for a project. Everyone would say that's a modern framework, with a modern website. I already know React, I'm quite familiar with prisma.js. Learning and using it was (and is, because now I have to maintain the project) painful, confusing, and full of footguns. I wanted to host on Cloudflare but half the stuff doesn't work so I'm forced into Vercel. Takes ages to understand how images work, how server side works, and so on, and those things are still confusing to me. Constantly I ran into tricky problem about getting data to a client side component, or server side, because some UI library wasn't server side or something like that. Even getting the two fonts I'd chosen into a client side component took me several hours! And I still felt like the solution I came up with was hacky and fighting against the framework.
I regret learning the "modern" framework. I don't regret learning Django. Don't let fancy marketing fool you into using a bad tool, or drive you away from a good one.
I trust them more precisely because they are not wasting resources making slick start-upy marketing fluff that make it difficult to find the actual information I am looking for.
Personally, I looked into protobuf for our Elixir/React Native wombocombo but the second I realized we would have to deploy app updates when we added or removed a field from the response structure it became a non-starter.
I can't imagine using protobuf when you're in the first 5 years of a product.
I'm pretty sure protobuf ignores new fields (if you add; assuming you add as an append, and not change the field ordering), and it recommends you not to remove a field to ensure backward compatibility.
So first it was bitcoin/crypto, now it's ai. pc gaming is dead at this point. i wonder if it will force developers to care about doing more with less hardware and optimize now.
Many studios don't even hire rendering engineers anymore. Much of AAA is UE5 slop. And then there is the looming AI slop, which publishers are already thinking about. I think it'll burst at some point, but it'll get worse before it gets better.
But then I switched to GLM 4.6 using Claude CLI tool and that was good enough and significantly cheaper/faster.
Then Opus 4.5 came out with better pricing and might as well just use that directly. Still working great.
With Amp I was spending $5 here and there every day. Great, but pricey.
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