Tiger's par on Hole 18 to win his fifth Masters (and his hug with his son).

The final lap between Verstappen and Hamilton at Abu Dhabi 2021.

I know these are all examples from the sports world, but I'm using them to illustrate my point: life can be compressed into a few seconds. The vast majority of life is like the emptiness of space, devoid of everything. What did you eat this morning? What did you do last week? Do you even remember? Neither do I.

However, in between the vast emptiness of life, there are a few special moments. Getting the keys to your first car or house. The moment you decided to go to an amusement park on a random Saturday and the rollercoaster almost broke your neck. That time you went to a Lakers game and it went into overtime. Man, it brings a smile to your face, doesn't it?

My goal in life is to collect and cultivate these moments. As many of them as I can.

Life boils down to a few seconds

If I had the privilege of starting a company in 2026, especially anything in tech, my first task would be to really think about how I could make it the most agent-native company. But what does this actually mean? Let's break it down.

The first part is (sort of) easy. Every engineer should be using agents to write their code. Every PR should be reviewed by coding agents. Every principle behind how you write code needs to be documented in an AGENTS.md file. Every rule you want to check PRs against should be written in a BUGBOT.md file. Pick whatever provider you'd like for these, that's up to you. But if you're not writing code with agents, you're running the race with one hand tied behind your back.

The second part is extending the basic philosophy of Part 1 to every vendor the company uses. Any choice for new vendors should be affected by whether or not they have an API or CLI. Get rid of them if they don't. This isn't always possible with a must-have vendor, but what you're trying to guard against is being invisible to agents. Agents need as much context as possible, so providing them the API keys or any meaningful level of visibility into your stack is an absolute must. Give your agents access to Slack, Sentry, Linear, Google Drive, AWS, GitHub. Do it all. This allows agents to make connections and reason across (historically) disparate silos of information across the company. This is a hidden superpower anyone can uncover with some basic plumbing.

Part 3 is encoding processes so that agents can execute rote tasks end to end. The simplest example of this is on-call rotations and investigations. You probably want information about investigations displayed in a certain way. Great! Write this down in a place where agents have easy access to it. This could be a skill or a document, and it doesn't matter. Every layer of a business can be augmented by high-level intelligence and reasoning in some way.

Part 4 is to repeat part 3 until your business runs semi-autonomously. My belief is that we haven't even scratched the surface of what these agents can do. Let your imagination roam free.

In my ideal world, all the tools that I use in my business are interconnected. I'm not left looking at 100+ @ mentions across Slack, Google Drive, and Linear trying to piece together a story of what's happening and what needs my attention today. My agents have done 80-90% of the work ahead of time. I'm only reviewing, making high-stakes, high-level decisions, or getting my hands dirty on tasks that are human-centric.

My agents track projects in Notion and Linear, keep tabs on activity within Slack (and are available to help me get tasks done), and my inbox is already managed and triaged before I wake up. My agents join meeting calls, transcribe them, automatically create tickets for things that require human input, create PRs for things that can be fixed immediately, and offer real-time advice when called upon in meetings, just like co-workers can (GPT Realtime, anyone?).

This isn't just some pipe dream though. This can be reality today.

The broader point here is that whenever you're thinking about your business from the perspective of agent integration, all the pieces you're using to build it should be accessible to agents. Context is the most important thing your agent can have. If it doesn't have proper context along every step of the work you're asking it to perform, it will fail. Open your business up to agents (both internally and externally) and see the magic that ensues.

The agent native company

The Knicks won the NBA championship in fives games on the back of an unlikely superstar: Jalen Brunson. He's won at the high school level, the college level, and now he's an NBA champion and Finals MVP to boot. But he was doubted at every level he played at even though the results were clear as day. After he got to the NBA (a second round recruit) he scored 41 points in a playoff game to singlehandedly help the Mavericks advance in the playoffs. What was his prize for doing so in free agency? A contract worth 50% less than the team who eventually signed him, the Knicks. Even so, the general consensus was that New York seemingly took a “wild” bet on Jalen Brunson by giving him a $100 million contract.

This all sounds absurd in retrospect, but I think there's a broader lesson in here for me and for everyone else who really wants to do something meaningful with their life: no one really knows what they're talking about. Absolute trust in anyone's words except for your own will likely disappoint you on your quest to achieve something. Jalen Brunson could have listened to all the people who told him he was “too small” or “not the right person to lead a team to a championship” but he decided to put more stock in his work and capabilities.

The reality is that it's very easy to be pessimistic. Realistically speaking, most of the time these people are right. What is actually very difficult is being optimistic and ignoring the deafening roar of the masses. Most people are not worth listening to. The only real path forward is stepping through life with optimism and hope.

No one (really) knows anything

I've been thinking about this quite a lot recently. The coding models have gotten so good at this point that, as of June 2026, I believe engineering as an applied discipline is never going to be the same again. Btw, I'm writing this after the infamous recall by the US Gov on Fable/Mythos. A sign of the times.

This leads me to the title of this post. What is the moat in software development in a world in which anyone can build anything? I find myself undulating constantly between shock and awe at the rate at which models are improving and the types of things that I can now hand off to them. In a few months' time, no engineer on the planet will have an edge, in terms of raw code generation, over any frontier model.

And maybe… this is a good thing? The Silicon Valley lore of the cracked engineer might be cracking. As someone who's been in the software industry for roughly a decade, I never really enjoyed writing the perfect line of code. For me it's always been about the outcomes that software enabled. Faster, cheaper, more efficient, less grunt work. These are outcomes. And in a world increasingly governed by better and better frontier AI coding models, this is what we should all be chasing after anyway.

In my mind, here are the rough moats around which we need to build software companies:

If you don't have anything worthy of selling, none of what follows actually matters. The good news is that you can quickly validate and test ideas now, at astonishingly high fidelity. You can have an MVP of a well-defined product working end-to-end in a matter of hours, let customers use it, see what they think, and promote or discard it from your backlog right away. Details matter as much as ever. The bar for quality software has always been high, but now that coding ability is no longer the bottleneck, the leverage is in how you communicate with the models. Customer interaction and the ability to extract product insight by talking to normal people is arguably more important than the ability to execute on ideas (execution is cheap now).

After product, this is the thing that differentiates mediocre companies from generational companies. If you don't have a solid GTM strategy, you will absolutely be crushed by your competitors who do. Because guess what? They have access to the same models you do, and their ability to copy-and-paste your products is laughably easy. If you want any chance of survival in the cutthroat AI app-layer landscape, your ability to sell matters more than ever. I would go as far as to say that in 2026, a high-quality sales rep is far more valuable than any engineering hire you can make. The differentiator here will be companies who deeply understand the space they're working in, the various pain points associated with it, and the matching product suite to actually deliver will win.

This ties into number 2 quite a bit, but the ability to form long-term relationships with clients and build trust is a massive moat. Ultimately at the app layer, what you're really doing is partnering with a company and telling them that “hey, we've got this so you can focus on what you do best.” You're trying to convey a sense of safety in going with your product over the competitors, and that comes when you do the right things: listen, have empathy, and care about the people in your pipeline. It's hard to do this, but when it's genuine, people know.

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Life boils down to a few seconds

The agent native company

No one (really) knows anything

What are the real moats if you're running a software company?