The Abundance Layer
Listen
Code used to be the bottleneck. It isn't anymore. LLMs turned software from a scarce, expensive constraint into something cheap and abundant. The thing that decides who wins in ecommerce is no longer engineering capacity. It's judgment, taste, and distribution. Operators who get this will run leaner teams, ship faster, and beat companies ten times their size. The winners won't have the most engineers. They'll have the best taste.
I run an 8-figure DTC CPG P&L and build most of my own internal tools. This is already how I work.
When code was scarce
For two decades, software was the constraint. Engineers were expensive. Hiring was slow. Every real feature needed a team, a sprint, and a fight over the roadmap. Companies built around that scarcity: big engineering teams, heavy process, "can we even build this?" as the first question.
What changes when software gets cheap
When software gets cheap to produce, the constraint doesn't disappear. It moves. The first question stops being "can we build it?" and becomes "should we, and is it any good?" The bottleneck is now the quality of your decisions: what to build, for whom, and whether the result is worth using.
| Code-scarce org (old) | Code-abundant org (new) | |
|---|---|---|
| First question | "Can we build it?" | "Should we, and is it good?" |
| Bottleneck | Engineering capacity | Judgment and taste |
| Team shape | Large, specialized | Small, high output |
| Speed to ship | Sprints and roadmaps | Days, sometimes hours |
| Who wins | Most resources | Best decisions and distribution |
What actually constrains you now
Three things are scarce now:
- Judgment. Knowing which of a hundred buildable things is worth building, and which to kill.
- Taste. The sense for what's good, not just what works. Customers feel the difference.
- Distribution. Getting the thing in front of people. Software is cheap now. Attention isn't.
None of these are engineering. They're operator skills.
What this means for ecommerce operators
The gain is large and it's available now. An operator who can build and ship their own tools doesn't wait in a queue or write a ticket. They go from "I have a hunch" to "it's live and I'm reading the data" in a day. That's a different kind of operator, not a faster version of the old one.
The other side: if your edge was managing a big team to build things slowly, that edge is going away. The market is repricing value away from headcount and toward judgment.
Frequently asked questions
Does this mean engineers don't matter? No. It means raw engineering capacity stops being the scarce resource that sets you apart. Engineers with judgment and taste are worth more than ever. Bodies to clear a ticket queue are not.
Won't everyone have cheap software, so the advantage cancels out? Everyone gets the tools. Not everyone has the taste to use them well. When the input is a commodity, the difference moves to judgment and distribution, which don't commoditize.
How does an operator build taste? Ship often. Look at the results honestly. Study operators whose work you respect. Taste is pattern recognition built from reps, not a course.
Note: seeded draft from a pillar in my articulation app, kept as a formatting example. The structure is the template. Sharpen the prose over time.