There was a front page post on HN here a few weeks ago where it said something like the moat is domain knowledge. It was true for us when we rebuilt the internal tool from scratch.

We did not rewrite our customer app but all maintenance and new feature code is 99% AI agent written and has been for the last 6 months.

You're not going to see us write a blog post about it though. We prefer not to tell our customers that the software they use is mostly AI written.

"Trap" here means the deal is so good that they don't ever want to leave.

It will increase the price for new comers, lower the quality of buildings due lack of maintenance funding, and decrease new construction.

Rental control is NIMBY for renters who are already there.

Rank these inventions in terms of importance to humanity.

Regardless, I didn't say "many". I said top tier. How you define that is up to you.

There is already ample evidence for top dev talent earning way more than before whether it's through corporate or starting their own company.

I threatened to leave to start my own company unless they gave me enough money to make me not want to do it. They did.

1. They can build and sell their own products or services. We are already seeing 1-2 person software companies earning real money. Top devs don’t have to stay in corporate if they think they can generate more revenue on their own.

2. When companies get rid of their B devs without losing productivity, they can pay their A devs more.

I’m in the #2 camp right now. My team shrank by 50% through attrition in the last year. We didn’t hire anyone new when someone left. My pay has increased.

Every business needs an accountant and a lawyer on hand. In the past, hiring one software engineer to build custom software for your small or midsized business was not worth it. What can one software engineer build? Maybe an MVP in a year? No chance it was worth it for the vast majority of businesses. Outside of corporations or tech companies, employing a software dev was simply not a thing.

Nowadays, your kindergarten might employ a full time or part time software engineer to build custom software. One dev can build a lot more a lot faster.

That said, I think the average or below average dev won’t earn $200k/year anymore. However, the top devs will earn more than ever. If AI increases an average dev’s productivity by 10x, then it will increase a top tier dev’s by 100x.

I think one piece that someone else mentioned could require DB sharding and that is all the live data needed for tracking deliveries.

The actual website/app should not need more than one beefy Postgres instance.

Everything else seems normal DB CRUD that a single beefy instance with a few replicas should handle easily. Type ahead search is no doubt using a different service and not directly querying Postgres.

No clue how a shopping cart or checkout flow would drastically increase database load. It should just be basic CRUD. Building a shopping cart is something every student makes. Pages in a web store can be cached relatively easily since items won't change often.

A primary DB with a few replicas and caching can go a really long way.