This time it is different. Because in the past, setting up that automation needed a, drumroll, qualified engineer. Now you can get a 14 year old halfway around the world who knows how to prompt alright enough to ship. There is no more moat.

"Low code" has been a dream of the industry for longer than I've been alive. There are reasons SQL and COBOL look superficially like English even when it's inefficient to do so. There are reasons Excel is the most popular programming language. Programmers have always been trying to enable non-programmers to write software.

Experience, culture, and domain knowledge are still somewhat of a moat. That foreign youth is unlikely to be able to write a good prompt for building, let's say, the software in an FDA-regulated medical device or custom Fortune 500 ERP application. The LLMs are great at building what you ask for but it's still garbage in / garbage out.

Increasingly less so though as these american companies themselves offshore not low skill work, but high skill work now brought on from general upskilling of the general population in recent decades along with massive investment in world class R&D campus facilities no different than what you see in that sort of facility stateside. Scary times ahead for the high skill american...

Would the Americans investing in SPY be saved?