upvote
Domain specific knowledge has been the moat for a long time, hasn't it? Outsourcing isn't new. Maybe you can do in a weekend for $500 what would have taken a month and $20k before, but code itself isn't a barrier to competition - even really good code.

On the other hand, much of the code I write is in an industry where training and operations manuals are closely guarded corporate secrets that make up the recipe or soul of a company. The job of the SWE is to deeply understand the processes and procedures that employees follow, and to write code that helps facilitate those and then gets out of the way. A lot of it comes from walking around and seeing how people are actually using the software and what works, and what's a pain point. I've always maintained that the value is in the operations manuals, and the code is just a logical extension of that. But that's where SaaS usually is insufficient because regardless how versatile and broad it is, it doesn't usually encapsulate enough domain knowledge, let alone the proprietary stuff.

reply
Oh yeah the SaaS-pocalypse is so new and there are so many different ways to try and understand and tackle it. Scary but exciting times!
reply
> The ultimate "what's your moat" question

One effective moat might be "Your LLM has never been trained on our closed source codebase."

reply