January 18, 2026
Software is commoditizing. Writing software is becoming less and less the bottleneck of building great products with each passing month. LLMs have made it incredibly cheap and easy to create good software. What matters most today is everything else: expertise, storytelling, distribution, brand, coordinating people, and unique data. Software still matters of course, but in 99% of cases, having the skills to write the low level functions and tricky algorithms that glue everything together are no longer a competitive advantage. What it means to be good at building software has changed significantly. Today, it means you understand how to model data with good abstractions and how to design performant systems. At my job, I spend 50% thinking about system design, 20% on code review, 20% on testing, and less than 10% writing manual code. Writing code is cheap, but building software that scales, is easy to maintain, and is durable is still hard.
Recently, I've been looking for more durability. I bought an Espressif ESP-32 microcontroller for a little hobby project I've been working on in my free time. I've been using LLMs to learn about embedded systems programming and Cursor to build it. The ESP-32 microcontroller is great to prototype and learn with, but the wildest version of success I can imagine would require me to move from proof of concept to a custom PCB, enclosure, and more. There's a lot that would go into that: PCB design, industrial design, manufacturing, supply chain and logistics, etc. I could spend months working on each item in that list.
Even after just some very lightweight experimenting of my own, it's clear to me that hardware has been, and will remain a major moat for companies who make great products for the foreseeable future. Hardware can't be copied easily, just like a beautifully printed magazine can't be copied easily. Great hardware products are scarce and have a high cost of failure. They take months and months of work with tons of high stakes decisions over long feedback loops. Because of this, I believe those who can wrangle the hardware development process and bring an amazing product to life will be massively rewarded in the coming years.
LLMs can't one shot a supply chain. It's that simple.