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AI is brilliant for external goods - money, status, and output - and potentially corrosive for internal ones - the skill, the mastery, and the satisfaction you can only get by doing the thing itself. People after external goods see AI as close to a superpower, as it makes people more productive and produces more output. However, for those interested in the internal goods, AI can feel like a loss, as it takes the parts they loved and hands it to a machine, leaving only supervision and accountability. While the output still arrives, the pride and satisfaction of owning the work is gone.

Using a frontier model for planning and then switching to a cheaper model for execution often results in higher costs and more redundancy due to the expensive reading involved with context capture. Instead, implementing a strategy where the frontier model explores and captures its understanding in a todo list before switching can improve efficiency and reduce costs.

Strong product strategies combine several sources of competitive advantage. Those advantages must be chosen carefully and revisited as the market changes.