Every founder building in AI right now has the same recurring nightmare. You ship something on Monday, customers love it on Tuesday, and by Friday three other companies have pivoted into your space with the same product. A frontier lab drops something adjacent. A YC batch launches five competitors. The thing you thought was your breakthrough turns out to be obvious.
The barrier to building has effectively collapsed. A CEO and a co-founder with no CTO, no engineering team, just vibe coding their way through pull requests — they can ship a real product now. They barely review code. They set up automations that generate screenshots and videos of new features. They move at speeds that were impossible two years ago.
This means every idea with any surface area gets built by multiple teams simultaneously. Not because anyone copied anyone, but because the idea was obvious and the tools to build it are available to everyone. The window between "novel product" and "commoditized feature" has compressed from years to weeks. If your agent strategy depends on being the only one who thought of something, you have already lost.
The counterintuitive move is to do the opposite of what every YC company in a competitive space is doing. Instead of pivoting fast, chasing traction, throwing spaghetti at the wall — pick a hard problem and refuse to leave. The founders who built 40 products and shipped none of them to revenue learned a lot, but they did not build companies. The ones who stayed in a space, fought through the commoditization waves, and kept compounding their understanding of the problem — those are the ones who eventually broke through.
I've argued that the durable infrastructure play sits underneath the orchestration layer, and the same logic applies here. Longevity and diligence are underrated when everyone else is optimizing for speed and novelty. Stay where the obvious idea cannot reach.
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Key takeaways
- The barrier to building has collapsed, so every idea with surface area gets built by multiple teams simultaneously within weeks.
- If your agent strategy depends on being the only one who thought of something, you have already lost.
- Diligence and longevity in a single problem space are underrated when everyone else is optimizing for speed and novelty.
FAQ
Why does every agent idea get cloned so fast now?
A CEO and co-founder with no engineering team can vibe-code their way to a real product. They ship at speeds that were impossible two years ago. So every idea with any surface area gets built simultaneously by multiple teams, not because anyone copied, but because the tools to build it are universal.
What is the right founder response to commoditization waves?
Pick a hard problem and refuse to leave. The founders who built 40 products and shipped none of them learned a lot but did not build companies. The ones who stayed in a space and compounded their understanding of the problem are the ones who broke through.