// 01
Code is the commodity now.
Four years ago, writing software was the bottleneck. Hiring engineers, scheduling sprints, running QA, most of a product's budget went into typing it into existence.
That's gone. Claude Code, Copilot, and the tier of tools after them have collapsed the cost of writing code to near zero. A competent founder can generate a high-fidelity MVP in a weekend.
Writing code is no longer the constraint.
// 02
Judgment didn't get cheaper.
What's actually hard now is everything AI can't hand you:
- What to build. Most MVPs solve problems nobody had.
- How to structure it. Architecture decisions you can't undo once you have users.
- What to cut. Every feature you add is a feature you have to defend.
- How to ship it without dying. Security, scale, reliability, cost, compliance.
None of these got cheaper. If anything, the gap between people who can generate code and people who can decide what code to generate has widened.
// 03
Vibe-coded products don't survive production.
An AI-generated MVP looks like a product. It demoes like a product. It passes the screenshot test.
Then users arrive and one of four things happens: it gets hacked (auth flow has holes nobody audited), it falls over (no rate limiting, no backpressure, no graceful degradation), it bleeds money (LLM calls with no budget ceiling, S3 without lifecycle rules), or it can't iterate (tangled prompts, no observability, nobody knows why it's slow).
Production is where the difference between looks like software and is software gets paid, in users and in dollars.
// 04
What we bring.
Three decades of writing code, fifteen of them inside systems that had to work the first time, means something different now than it did then. Now it means: we know the thousand small decisions that sit between a vibe-coded MVP and a product that survives its first ten thousand users, and we make them in the first week, not after the first outage.
The 70/30 deal on /start/ works because this kind of experience is concentrated, fast, and hard to rent by the hour.