HeritageLab

What is easy to copy is usually the final crystallization.

What is hard to copy is the architecture that kept choosing that crystallization over all the others.

copyable artifact ≠ copyable architecture

That is why “they can clone it in days” is often true at the product layer and still incomplete at the company layer.

They cloned the surface, not the engine.

This reads less like “AI poisoned the field” and more like the old map stopped working. The paycheck mattered, but so did the structure around it: deadlines, meetings, visible progress, a reason to keep moving. When that disappears, the loss often shows up as disgust with the whole ecosystem because there’s no replacement frame yet.