If execution is no longer the differentiator, what is?
In a post entitled Ideas are cheap, execution is cheaper, Dave Kiss talks about his changing role as a software developer in a world of AI. It’s something I wrote about here. The hard part isn’t coming up with ideas or even shipping them any more; it’s what happens after that. Iteration. Support. Maintenance. Care.
Earlier this week, after switching from Google to Proton and needing an appointment scheduler, I got Perplexity to come up with a Product Reference Document (PRD) after a conversation discussing what I needed. Then I put that into Cursor and about 10 minutes later I had the basis of Scheduler which I’ve released on GitHub.
It needs some tweaking around mail delivery, but it’s running at scheduler.dougbelshaw.com. The hard bit wasn’t the idea, or the execution, but keeping it running, maintaining it, and iterating on new features.
I tweeted about Triage in response to someone saying talented engineers now write the majority of their code with agents. My reply: “What about not writing the code at all?” I described the idea—users report bugs to AI, AI triages and implements, AI opens the PR.
Days later, the same person published an article: “Our AI agent now files its own bug reports.”
They liked my tweet, saw the idea, and shipped it.
I’m not claiming ownership. That’s exactly the point. In a world where execution is trivial, ideas become instantly commodifiable. The moat isn’t “I can build this and you can’t.” The moat can’t be that anymore, because anyone can build anything. The window between sharing an idea and someone else shipping it has collapsed from months to days—sometimes hours.
[…]
If execution is no longer the differentiator, what is?
Speed of iteration matters. Not speed of initial build—everyone has that now. Speed of learning. How fast can you ship, learn from users, and adapt? The teams that win will be the ones that cycle fastest, not the ones that build first.
Taste matters. Knowing what’s worth building. Knowing what to say no to. In a world where you can build anything, the scarcest resource is judgment about what should exist. Most things shouldn’t.
Distribution matters. It always did, but now it matters more. When everyone can build, the only differentiation is who people hear about, who they trust, whose product they encounter first. The network you can tap into for trials and feedback—that’s the real moat.
Problem selection matters. The hardest part of building software was never typing the code. It was figuring out which problems are real, which solutions people will pay for, which bets are worth making. That calculus hasn’t changed. If anything, it’s more important now because the cost of building the wrong thing is lower, which means more wrong things will get built.
The “execution is hard” era trained us to be careful about what we committed to building. That constraint is gone. The new discipline is choosing wisely when you can build anything.
Source: Dave Kiss
Image: Resource Database