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title: Engineering produces wisdom
tags: post
date: 2026-09-19
---

A software organization can generate competitive advantage in many ways: network effects, branding/counter-positioning, switching costs, etc.

One historical way to build power has been creating leverage through engineering: an engineering organization that can generate value quickly or cheaply is better than one that can't.

Gauging the efficacy of an engineering organization is, sadly, an unsolved problem, but three useful aspects are:

1. speed
2. stability
3. cost 

These must be considered as vectors, not points; I find myself constantly amazed at the efficacy of LLMs while also being surprised at how and why they fail a given task in uninteresting and inscrutable ways.

Models from frontier labs are currently very cheap (but could soon not be); they are very fast (but tend to lower their own velocity over time); they are good at improving some but not all aspects of stability.

Just as Warhol said that a Coke is a Coke and you're drinking the same bottle as the president, there is little variance across model performance for consumers. The marginal advantage of various point-level improvements quickly accretes to the commons thanks to open-source.

To the extent that you cede responsibility for your codebase to an LLM, you diminish your ability to generate leverage from your codebase over a sufficiently long-term horizon; phrased differently, ceding responsibility to the LLM means sacrificing wisdom. Is that a big deal? Well:

1. My experience with LLMs is such that, at least today, I can be wiser about a codebase than an LLM. (Reasonable people can disagree!)
2. My experience with running a business is such that, at least today, wisdom is a useful lever to build a codebase which provides competitive advantage over incumbents. (Reasonable people can disagree!)

Discussions about our current _rituals_ (hand-writing code, reviewing pull requests, etc.) are really discussions about the value of engineering as a process vs. the value of engineering as something which produces an artifact.

It is a reasonable position for someone to think that the value of engineering as a process is going to zero. But if you believe that, you better have a coherent answer of where your competitive advantage is coming from once every other organization you compete with is using the same tools as you.