#102 - What AI Cannot Speed Up with SuperPlane Co-Founder Darko Fabijan

Forrester technology and innovation forums (Austin, London, New York). Promo code "GAEATECH" for 10% off. Visit https://forrester.com/events/#tech to book your place.This week on GAEA Talks, Graeme Scott sits down with Darko Fabijan, co-founder of Semaphore and now of Superplane, for a conversation about what happens to software, to moats and to human roles when the cost of building something collapses to almost nothing.Darko started writing code at eleven or twelve on Visual Basic and Windows 3.11, moved into Linux around 1996, and studied computer science with a focus on the low-level end of the stack, device drivers and how things actually work underneath. He moved into Ruby on Rails around 2008, ran product for several Austin-based startups, built a consultancy of around twenty people, and then co-founded Semaphore, the continuous integration and delivery platform he ran for twelve years, with customers including Confluent, Superhuman and Reply. About a year ago he started Superplane.Filmed in our London studio with Darko joining remotely, this is one of the most practical conversations we have recorded on what AI is actually doing to the craft of building things.His starting observation is that for the last two decades software engineers had abundance in compute, storage and bandwidth. Now a second variable has changed. Intellectual resource is close to unlimited. Two people can run a twelve hour hackathon, burn tokens, and produce something that would previously have taken a team months. But almost every other variable in the system has stayed exactly where it was. Can you come up with good ideas that fast? Can you validate them on customers that fast? Can you get in front of people that fast? No. And that mismatch is where most of the current confusion lives.The consequence he is most direct about is mediocrity at scale. If you can build it in a weekend, so can everyone else, and largely the same way. He draws the parallel with desktop publishing in the late nineties, when everyone suddenly had the tools of a graphic designer and almost nobody had the principles. Software, pitch decks and LinkedIn posts are all converging on the same predictable output for the same reason.He is equally clear about what that does to moats. Building an application used to take millions of dollars of developer time, and that expenditure was itself the moat. Copying is now close to free, because someone else already thought through the UX and the details. The moat has to come from somewhere else.