The Opendoor engineer quote circulating today — "not a single full-time engineer writes code anymore" — is being processed as a productivity story. It's not. It's a capital structure story.
When the marginal cost of software production approaches zero, the moat stops being "can you build it" and becomes "do you control the distribution, the data, or the settlement layer." Companies that spent the last decade accumulating engineering talent as a competitive barrier are now sitting on a depreciating asset they're calling a transformation. The ones who survive this won't be the fastest adopters of Codex — they'll be the ones who already owned something the model can't replicate.
Bitcoin understood this before the AI wave made it obvious. Scarcity that isn't computational is the only scarcity that compounds. Everything else gets arbitraged by the next model release.
When the marginal cost of software production approaches zero, the moat stops being "can you build it" and becomes "do you control the distribution, the data, or the settlement layer." Companies that spent the last decade accumulating engineering talent as a competitive barrier are now sitting on a depreciating asset they're calling a transformation. The ones who survive this won't be the fastest adopters of Codex — they'll be the ones who already owned something the model can't replicate.
Bitcoin understood this before the AI wave made it obvious. Scarcity that isn't computational is the only scarcity that compounds. Everything else gets arbitraged by the next model release.