Momentum is the Safest Moat
If you are at all worried about AI disrupting your business, learn to build momentum. Your ability to execute more reps that your competition is, and always has been, the best moat.
The trigger for this post was hearing that Claude Code was built in a weekend. It's probably mildly exaggerated but it led a lot of folks to claim that it's not worth much if its that quick to build.
That version, the one the shipped that weekend, probably not.
The fact that they kept shipping however, is very valuable.
This isn't something specific about Claude Code or the team at Anthropic. Teams that are able to move quickly will win in the long run, as long as they can meet two criteria.
That is assuming that they can keep up the speed as they scale, and that they're moving cohesively.
Most companies slow as they scale. Most slow down faster than they scale up. Taking the momentum metaphor literally, their momentum goes down. Moving fast as you get bigger is hard. It feels necessary to slow down as you get bigger, there's more to lose and more people involved in the process. This isn't building momentum.
More people means more process, more layers of communication and more chance of incoherence. You still ship quickly but what you ship is almost random. Features come out but top line metrics don't move. This isn't building momentum either.
Momentum is fighting the urge to add process and ensure you're shipping valuable features again and again.
It takes a lot of effort. Mostly saying no to things. Strip back the things that aren't "deliver more value" and then find out how to do that faster.
This is how you take on a giant. Arguably this even applies to things like Claude Code. The bigger it's gotten, the more that's been added and the more the team has been focused on other things, the less momentum they maintain.
They will have economies of scale, network effects, cornered resources and all the other things we typically associate with moats. Those haven't gone away. Your ability to move fast enough that they don't hold the same weight is what's new.
Get stuck in, keep your head down, do the reps.