The Economy of Algorithms

Drying the Moat


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Hey, it’s Marek.

I’ve been walking around like a zombie for weeks. I just cannot stop building. I built a personal CRM that pulls together my email, social networks, and messages into one place. Something no vendor would ever sell me. I could do it because AI helped me figure out how to get past the walls those platforms put up.

That’s what I call “drying the moat”, and it’s the same thing that just wiped $40 billion off IBM’s market value in a single day. A demonstration of a functionality that had been there for months, but almost no one realised. Anthropic showed what Claude Code can do with COBOL systems, and the market reacted with panic: when AI makes incomprehensible systems comprehensible, the business models built on that incomprehensibility start to crack.

Surprising news for software vendors: when building and migrating become nearly free, you actually have to compete on value (and not lock-in). Call me crazy, but I think that’s exciting.

Stay curious!



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The Economy of AlgorithmsBy Marek Kowalkiewicz