A thing I keep running into: the people most excited about how fast they can build something are rarely the people who know what should be built.
We've crossed a genuinely strange threshold. Anyone can now ship a working product in the time it takes to sit through a bad meeting. The tooling is extraordinary. The demos are extraordinary. And the result is that a working product is no longer evidence of anything, the way a well-lit photograph stopped being evidence of a photographer somewhere around 2011.
The art world sorted this out a long time ago and mostly refuses to say it out loud. Plenty of contemporary work is good. Some of it is very good. And a fair amount of it is reproducible by anyone with the same materials and a free weekend, which is fine, but it does mean the interesting question moves. Not "how was this made" but "what does this person know that I don't, and did they put any of it in here."
That's now the only question worth asking about software too. The scaffolding is free. The model is rented. What you're actually selling is whatever sits underneath: proprietary data, hard-won judgment, a network that took years, or a decade of watching one specific thing go wrong in one specific way.
If there's nothing under there, you haven't built a business. You've built a very convincing veneer, and veneer has a way of coming off in the summer.
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