The non-technical technical advantage
A growing class of people aren't the best engineers, but understand the technology well enough to follow it all the way to a market. That bridge may be worth more than either end.
not the deepest engineer in the room. the widest.
trying to answer →What happens to expertise when everyone has the same models?
Most value in technology gets lost in translation. An engineer knows what a capability can do. A founder, investor or operator knows what a market will pay for. Very few people can walk the whole chain without falling off:
capability → product → market → economics → adoption
The people who can are rarely the deepest engineers. They understand the technology well enough to know what’s real and what’s a demo, and they understand the business well enough to know what it would take for someone to change their habits. Call them translators.Most of the pieces on this site are attempts to walk that chain for one idea at a time. Who got paid follows one shortage from the chip to the margins.
AI makes the technical end easier to reach: you can now build something real without being an engineer. It doesn’t make the far end any easier. Knowing why a hospital won’t buy it, or why the unit economics break at scale, still takes contact with the world. So the bridge gets more valuable as the near end gets crowded.
Unfinished: I’m not sure this is a class of people or a stage people pass through. Possibly the second, which would make it an argument for learning in public.