2 months ago
- Ablative software is built to fill gaps in current AI models and is consumed when the next generation closes those gaps, as seen with Cognition's price drop from $500 to $20.
- Companies like Jasper, Chegg, Pinecone, and Adept illustrate the pattern: their value evaporated when models improved, showing that software built on model shortcomings is a consumable, not an asset.
- Frontier labs use the ecosystem of tools built on their models to identify gaps, then close them in the next training run, making today's revenue a measure of future casualties.
- The real value lies not in scaffolding code but in non-trainable edges: proprietary data, distribution, liability acceptance, and domain judgment.
- Surviving companies treat their software as fuel, not a fortress: they cut prices, rebuild around new models, and charge for outcomes rather than machinery.
- Founders should run self-ablation experiments, design for planned obsolescence, and keep an honest ledger acknowledging that model progress is the main driver of software decay.