Historically, the market fed on a diet rich in a single ingredient: information asymmetry.
To turn frontier science into an everyday utility, the market charged a steep toll.
I call it the Complexity Intermediation Tax. It took an army of translators between the lab and the final client: agencies, consultancies, devs, some rigid corporate SaaS and hyper-specialized professionals.
Think of it like eating at a fine-dining restaurant. You are not paying just for the food; you pay for the farm, the logistics, the chef who studied in France for years, the kitchen machinery and the waiter in a suit. The traditional software model worked exactly like that.
Until now.
AI bulldozing the supply chain
Artificial Intelligence today acts like a bulldozer running over that supply chain. It takes the bizarre math of an academic paper on latent diffusion and, within weeks, puts the ability to generate perfect images straight into the hands of the corner bakery owner.
AI does not merely make the process cheaper; it acts as the ultimate translator of complexity. The market's value stopped being technical execution (knowing which button to press or which code to write to avoid a fatal miss click) and became vision (knowing what to ask for). For now, at least.
In this scenario, open source acts as a relentless solvent. A dozen brilliant minds release an open-weights model.
The next day, degens and independent devs (the "Super Builders") wrap it into direct solutions, cutting out the middleman. That corporate SaaS you used to subscribe to, which deep down was just a pretty, overpriced interface for a bureaucratic flow, loses its reason to exist.
Helen cortando a Taxa de Complexidade
The end of the midfield and the migration to the extremes
Market value is migrating abruptly from the middle to the tips. Average agencies, generic consultants and do-it-all software are being squeezed without mercy.
Capital now flows to two absolute poles:
🔸 The Base (Infrastructure): The raw foundation. Cloud providers and hardware makers (like Nvidia).
🔹 The Tip (Hyper-Niche Product): The focus on user experience. The independent builder who solves a hyper-specific pain and delivers straight to the end consumer, without friction.
The Silicon Landlord: the compute bottleneck
But let's be realistic (and here comes my bias as someone who took plenty of beatings configuring infra): there is a ceiling to this decentralized utopia. Open source destroys the software intermediary, but it does not eliminate the hardware landlord.
You skip Adobe and the print shop, but AWS or Google are still there, charging the compute toll.
It is perfectly viable to steal fire from the gods using open source, but physical processing keeps the foundations of power very well established.
An AI like Gemini 3.1, as absurd as it is, is still a colossal pile of parameters running on a Big Tech's multi-million-dollar servers, waiting to receive real utility before turning into technological dust.
How, then, do you position yourself to capture that value at the client's tip, without getting strangled by infrastructure costs or the mood swings of dominant APIs? In my case, the game changed by sharpening the core of the operation.
A economia halter da IA
The real trench: context and UX
What shields many operations today, in my opinion, is obsessive proximity to the end user's pain. I am migrating a large part of my energy purely to the orchestration layer. In practice, my stack has been guided by these pillars to survive the dust that never settles:
🔹 Radical agnosticism: Do not marry anyone's infra. If you miss click the architecture and build everything depending on a single closed API, you completely lose your borderless posture. If the provider changes the rules or the server chokes (which happens all the time 😂), you need to be able to route to an open source model in seconds.
🔸 Proprietary data in the veins: The generic LLM knows a lot about the world, but knows absolutely nothing about your client's specific operation. The gold is in plugging that raw intelligence into the messy day-to-day data of the people who use it. That creates a concrete bridge of utility, trading social feed hype for real life yield.
🌐 A sick focus on user experience: That talk about delivering a beautiful, fluid product has never been so vital. If the backend logic is now trivial to replicate, the interface and the reduction of friction became the real differentiators.
🎯 Escape the Interface, go for Niche Infra. The war of generic chats has already been lost. If your product is just a chat or a do-it-all generator, you are fighting a tsunami with an umbrella, competing against billion-dollar free tools. Your product needs to be a bottom-of-funnel solution, solving an annoying problem nobody else wants to solve.
🏗️ The Source of Truth and scaling without hardcode. Architecture matters from day one. To compete and scale fast like a Super Builder, run from hardcode. Build with a monorepo mindset: keep a global .env, a single "source of truth", avoiding duplicated code at all costs. Evolving the category? Call the previous one V1 and ship a clean V2. All running on top of a real-time, reactive database (like Convex) to deliver a beautiful, fluid product.
I tested going heavy on building my own infrastructure in the past and, being honest, it fails badly at maintenance. You end up trying to go head-to-head with trillion-dollar hardware budgets, which is financial suicide. When I flipped the switch and started using AI as an invisible gear, running quietly in the background without the user needing to understand what a prompt is, for the first time I genuinely like the result I am delivering.
The magic happens when the end user solves their problem without even noticing they are standing on the shoulders of the silicon giants back there. It is still very early to call the definitive monetization model for these new Super Builders, but for now, focusing on curing the problem rather than selling the technical complexity looks like the safest path.
A ascensao do Super Builder
Conclusion
The "middle" is dead. That may be the biggest certainty of this new cycle.
But, the way I see it, for whoever is willing to embrace the infra at the base and focus on the client's exact pain at the tip, the asymmetry has never been so favorable. It is still very early, and the leverage for those who know how to build on the shoulders of giants is colossal.
And you? How have you been handling these compute and API costs? Are you migrating your stack or still stuck in the midfield? Feel free to send a message
*P.S.: As always, do your own DYOR when choosing your tools. If you want a deeper exchange on applying this to your project, the door is open, and I appreciate you sharing the pains.
Big hug ✌️