Seth M

The pride of knowing is dead, long live the farming (AI's attempt to process my notes of the last week...) --- There used to be pride in knowing things. The internet rewarded it. If you knew how to code, how markets worked, how networks scaled, how to click the right buttons in the right order—you had leverage. But walking around the zoo the other day, watching animals that don’t know a single fact about the world yet are perfectly adapted to it, it hit me: knowledge itself isn’t the scarce resource anymore. Machines know everything instantly. The interface is dissolving. There’s no menu, no clicking, no “figuring out the software.” You just state intent and the system does the work. When the interface disappears, knowing how to use the tool stops being impressive. What matters again is deciding what should exist. In a world where intelligence is cheap and software is trivial to generate, the advantage shifts from the mechanic to the farmer—the person who tends systems over time, curates environments, and patiently grows durable things. That shift also exposes a mistake the tech industry has made for decades: confusing products with companies. When software was hard, a clever product could masquerade as a business for years. But if AI collapses the cost of building and copying software, “hard to build” stops being a moat overnight. Strategy comes roaring back. Distribution, trust, markets, identity—these become the real defenses. You can see it everywhere already: the internet now assumes everything is machine-generated until proven otherwise, which means the weird new primitives are things like proving you’re a robot, not a human, or paying for APIs with compute puzzles instead of dollars. The future internet may look less like a collection of apps and more like a living ecosystem—bots negotiating, humans directing, machines paying rent in compute. In that world the builders who win won’t just ship clever tools. They’ll cultivate environments where value compounds. They’ll think like farmers, not product managers.