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We're Gonna Need a Bigger Moat
AI Notes
The essay began life as background material for Cheating Is All You Need, Steve's much-larger May 2023 Sourcegraph post, and grew large enough that he extracted it. The trigger is two Google events the same week: Geoffrey Hinton's resignation and subsequent tour explaining the "tech zombie apocalypse" he sees coming, and a leaked internal Google memo arguing that open-source models had effectively caught up with closed-source ones in something like ten weeks.
Steve's argument: those two events together mean every SaaS company building on top of LLMs — including the coding assistants he himself works on — has just discovered its moat is too small. The Matrix-helicopter analogy is the central image: if LLM instances can share knowledge instantly, then "specialised model trained on proprietary data" is defensible only for as long as it takes the next instance to download the specialisation. The title is the Jaws line, and the cover takes it literally. It is the structural-economics companion to Cheating Is All You Need.
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2023
Cheating Is All You Need
The companion essay. Bigger Moat began life as the background section of Cheating Is All You Need and was extracted when that one outgrew its banks.
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2023
Death of the Junior Developer
Same year, same instinct about pace, applied to careers instead of business moats. Bigger Moat is the corporate version; Death of the Junior Developer is the personal one.
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2026
The AI Vampire
Three years later, the same argument has aged into something darker. AI Vampire is what the leviathan eventually looks like to the people inside the castle.