The tool is not the moat

I built a tool that took a finished design and cut it into pieces ready to ship. Then models got good enough to do the same thing from a single sentence.

If the value is in a single transformation, a model will eat it. If the value is in the system around it, it won’t.

What a model can’t do alone is know your business: who approves what, where the data lives, what "done" means here. That context is the moat. The tool is just the last step.

— T.