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The Line of Competence & The Modern Market

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The Line of Competence & The Modern Market

The Line of Competence & The Modern Market

Creation is easier now. Winning is not.
Creation is easier now. Winning is not.

EC

EC

Eli Crane

Published June 3rd, 2026

8 minute read

The Competence Line

A.I. as Acceleration

Leverage Is Not Direction

The New Founder Problem

Conclusion

The Competence Line

The Competence Line

Thirty years ago, if you wanted to be a serious photographer you needed expensive equipment, intentional planning, technical knowledge, editing skill, and some form of distribution through professional access or a network. There wasn't really a path around the moat of photography at the time. Sure, you could buy a Casio QV-10A, one of the cheapest and easiest-to-use cameras on the market at the time, for about $500, but the line stopped there. The barrier to access still stood extremely tall. A professional photographer required professional photographer things: equipment, connections, software, and distribution. That barrier filtered the market. Not perfectly, but enough that competence was extremely hard to fake or easily enter.


Then came the iPhone. And with it, bridges started to be built over barriers of access across all sorts of industries, hobbies, skills, and jobs. Instagram started the big bang of photo and content distribution, easy-to-use color grading and photo editing software became extremely hot, online tutorials started the rapid flow of gatekept knowledge, and most importantly, there was a camera in everyone's back pocket. A camera that was easy to use, competent, frictionless, and improving every single year.


The barrier to entry did not lower. It tipped over.


Suddenly, almost everyone could produce work that looked good enough at first glance. Your mom's best friend, the neighbor's cousin, the odd man at the supermarket, the group of kids you see walking home from school, your gym partner, your college professor. Everyone. With the device attached to their hip at all hours of the day. Given all this, the assumption would be that photography became incredibly easy, right? That the new influx of access would give way to better photographers, better work, and better art. But access does not create mastery. It creates participation. There is an invisible line inside of every industry, topic, and area of work that determines how people judge or view the work inside of it. Easier entry does not create an easier market. It creates a wider market and pushes that invisible line farther up. The line of competence rises, and suddenly the out-of-focus, uncomposed picture of the sunset that your mother-in-law snapped after three glasses of wine after dinner no longer seems to impress anyone. This is a good thing.


When the tools are hard to access, the market is filtered by capability. When the tools become easy to access, the line starts to accelerate. Everyone can, indeed, start an Instagram account tomorrow and start taking pictures. However, the only people who are going to succeed are the people with true displays of mastery, intentional technical and artistic taste, and a real differentiating factor that makes people want to pay attention. Attention is very expensive. Basic visual quality is no longer an advantage. Options are plentiful. Now, this upward movement of the competence line exists in every nook and cranny of the market and even life itself. It is what gives birth to innovation, progress, and the improvement of everything around us. As the line moves, so do our standards of quality, what we are willing to accept, and even the snobbiness of our taste.


On November 30, 2022, ChatGPT was publicly released as a research preview. While it was never as cut and dry as the progression of photography, it is almost irrefutable that artificial intelligence's impact has knocked down an unparalleled amount of barriers to entry. Like knocking down an entire forest in a single swing. What was once impressive becomes expected. What once signaled skill becomes the new baseline, impacting not just the modern market itself, but the people inside of it. Starting a business used to be such a difficult feat because of all the high-friction, high-bar-to-access factors that play into the act. It was the equivalent of photography in the 90s. But now, everyone's got a phone. Everyone's got an idea. Everyone's got a social page. Everyone's got something to sell. The noise is deafening. The line of competence is blurry.


Where do we go from here?

Artificial Intelligence as Acceleration

Artificial Intelligence as Acceleration

I'm sure you've heard the saying in some form over the last couple of years: "taste is now the competitive advantage." That statement is true more than it ever has been, but with a slight degree of nuance that must be understood. Taste does not win the game by itself. It does not make you the millions. It does not create demand, replace strategy, or make people care about something that has no real use. Taste is not the engine. It is simply the filter, the attachment that can make your output sitting at the competence line push forward farther. In a market where everyone can produce more, faster, and cleaner, taste is what decides what should exist, what should be removed, and what is worthy of attention.


Now, everybody is saying a lot of things about A.I., but only a select few are being truly honest. It has become a very strong move, in terms of interactions, views, and engagement, to make bold, aggressive claims about artificial intelligence. Claiming the end of entire industries, denouncing any value inside of A.I. and any inherent worth, or even just creating scenarios and positions that do not exist in any reality that we know. In fact, some internet personalities and select corners of the web have fully been consumed by this line of thinking. I don't think it is very honest.


The honest read is much less dramatic. A.I. is neither magic nor useless. It is an acceleration layer. It makes certain parts of work faster, cheaper, and more accessible: research, writing, design, software, strategy, presentation, organization, comparison, synthesis, and exploration. It helps sharpen the blade, but it doesn't make the cut itself. A.I. does not automatically make the work good. Like the spread of cameras, it makes the work easier to produce. A founder can now create a clean landing page, write an intriguing launch post, mock up a product, draft a pitch deck, research a market, build a basic tool, and sound far more serious than they would have sounded five years ago.


But now, that becomes the competence line. These things suddenly no longer signify a stable, credible, trustworthy, or valuable company. The room has gotten louder, faster, and more convincing. The competence line moves upward again.

I'm sure you've heard the saying in some form over the last couple of years: "taste is now the competitive advantage." That statement is true more than it ever has been, but with a slight degree of nuance that must be understood. Taste does not win the game by itself. It does not make you the millions. It does not create demand, replace strategy, or make people care about something that has no real use. Taste is not the engine. It is simply the filter, the attachment that can make your output sitting at the competence line push forward farther. In a market where everyone can produce more, faster, and cleaner, taste is what decides what should exist, what should be removed, and what is worthy of attention.


Now, everybody is saying a lot of things about A.I., but only a select few are being truly honest. It has become a very strong move, in terms of interactions, views, and engagement, to make bold, aggressive claims about artificial intelligence. Claiming the end of entire industries, denouncing any value inside of A.I. and any inherent worth, or even just creating scenarios and positions that do not exist in any reality that we know. In fact, some internet personalities and select corners of the web have fully been consumed by this line of thinking. I don't think it is very honest.


The honest read is much less dramatic. A.I. is neither magic nor useless. It is an acceleration layer. It makes certain parts of work faster, cheaper, and more accessible: research, writing, design, software, strategy, presentation, organization, comparison, synthesis, and exploration. It helps sharpen the blade, but it doesn't make the cut itself. A.I. does not automatically make the work good. Like the spread of cameras, it makes the work easier to produce. A founder can now create a clean landing page, write an intriguing launch post, mock up a product, draft a pitch deck, research a market, build a basic tool, and sound far more serious than they would have sounded five years ago.


But now, that becomes the competence line. These things suddenly no longer signify a stable, credible, trustworthy, or valuable company. The room has gotten louder, faster, and more convincing. The competence line moves upward again.

Leverage Is Not Direction

Leverage Is Not Direction

Now we have a market that has removed a large amount of friction from almost any form of market entry. The place has gotten considerably more dense. More people can build, more people can publish, more people can package themselves into something that appears serious. However, the line has already left, or is going to leave, most of the participants in the dust. Leverage is not the same thing as direction.


This also becomes a conversation of conviction, experience, and personal drive. Artificial intelligence cannot decide where movement matters. It can help organize, draft, polish, compare, and structure various high and low-level tasks, but it does not know what should exist. It does not know what people will care about or respond to. It cannot understand urgency or people in a very human sense. It can generate possibilities, but it cannot carry responsibility for choosing them.


A.I. is a tool that is subject to the mathematical mean of all things, meaning an advantage for you is also an advantage for everyone. It does not have hunches or unique life experiences that make its actions and viewpoints incomparable. It is the sum of trillions of weights. It has no real voice. This is where intentional, almost stupid conviction becomes so incredibly important in the early days of business. It is why personal experience, no matter how unexceptional or unsuccessful, is still one of our greatest assets. Personal drive makes us say, “screw what everyone thinks, I can make this happen. I enjoy the journey. I am passionate about this.”


I think it has become fairly obvious that people no longer associate the larger commercial large language models with tools, but with these strange intelligent entities that feel like humans stuck on a server rack. The tools are still tools. They have just gotten scary good. The man still needs to be able to properly use the tool. This is why acceleration is such a strange advantage: it rewards hyper-clarity and punishes any sort of confusion. If you are crystal clear, you become a faster, sharper founder. If you are not, you will spend your days building worthless garbage disguised as attractive progress. You will place yourself in the hamster wheel and decorate it nicely until it becomes your home.


The tool amplifies the operator. As intelligence and capability go up, the competence line moves with it. Anything under the line starts to disappear.

Now we have a market that has removed a large amount of friction from almost any form of market entry. The place has gotten considerably more dense. More people can build, more people can publish, more people can package themselves into something that appears serious. However, the line has already left, or is going to leave, most of the participants in the dust. Leverage is not the same thing as direction.


This also becomes a conversation of conviction, experience, and personal drive. Artificial intelligence cannot decide where movement matters. It can help organize, draft, polish, compare, and structure various high and low-level tasks, but it does not know what should exist. It does not know what people will care about or respond to. It cannot understand urgency or people in a very human sense. It can generate possibilities, but it cannot carry responsibility for choosing them.


A.I. is a tool that is subject to the mathematical mean of all things, meaning an advantage for you is also an advantage for everyone. It does not have hunches or unique life experiences that make its actions and viewpoints incomparable. It is the sum of trillions of weights. It has no real voice. This is where intentional, almost stupid conviction becomes so incredibly important in the early days of business. It is why personal experience, no matter how unexceptional or unsuccessful, is still one of our greatest assets. Personal drive makes us say, “screw what everyone thinks, I can make this happen. I enjoy the journey. I am passionate about this.”


I think it has become fairly obvious that people no longer associate the larger commercial large language models with tools, but with these strange intelligent entities that feel like humans stuck on a server rack. The tools are still tools. They have just gotten scary good. The man still needs to be able to properly use the tool. This is why acceleration is such a strange advantage: it rewards hyper-clarity and punishes any sort of confusion. If you are crystal clear, you become a faster, sharper founder. If you are not, you will spend your days building worthless garbage disguised as attractive progress. You will place yourself in the hamster wheel and decorate it nicely until it becomes your home.


The tool amplifies the operator. As intelligence and capability go up, the competence line moves with it. Anything under the line starts to disappear.

The New Founder Problem

The New Founder Problem

The market no longer rewards polish, and starting has never been easier. This changes the very nature of what makes business so difficult. It is no longer simply an equation of creation, but a complex formula of value, meaning, and real demand. The clean website, the polished brand, the functional app: all worthless unless they matter to paying customers. The competence line has moved.


So the modern founder is left with the same brutal questions, only now they are amplified in a cramped room. Who needs this? Why now? Why you? Why this version? Why should anyone care enough to switch, pay, share, trust, or return? What is the real pain? What is the real behavior? What does the customer already believe, and where does this idea attach itself to that belief?


The problem becomes complex pretty quick. When do you rely on true human output? When do you fully automate a process? When does speed help the company, and when does it strip the company of the very thing that made it worth paying attention to? When should the founder use A.I. to move faster, and when should they slow down because the decision requires taste, context, or emotional intelligence?


These become deep strategic questions that fundamentally alter every detail of the business. This is why the competence line is able to move so freely: when it does, layers of abstraction also get piled onto whatever is above it. A simple version of this already exists in software. A person writes in a high-level language, which gets translated downward through layers they rarely see: frameworks, JavaScript, assembly, machine code, electricity. The higher you sit on the stack, the more powerful the tools feel, but the less direct contact you have with what is actually happening underneath.


A.I. creates a similar condition for founders. It lets them operate higher up the stack of business, using complex systems to carry out work that used to require direct skill, time, or technical understanding. This is incredibly powerful, but it also means the founder is making decisions farther away from the ground. It stops becoming a first-order thinking exercise and starts becoming a third-order thinking equation. You have to think further into the future, analyze the ripple effects that emerge, and understand with incredible accuracy what is actually important and what is not. This is no longer what makes you a world-class founder. It is what is required to simply stay above the line.


This is the new problem. The layers of abstraction pile up as the competence line moves.

The market no longer rewards polish, and starting has never been easier. This changes the very nature of what makes business so difficult. It is no longer simply an equation of creation, but a complex formula of value, meaning, and real demand. The clean website, the polished brand, the functional app: all worthless unless they matter to paying customers. The competence line has moved.


So the modern founder is left with the same brutal questions, only now they are amplified in a cramped room. Who needs this? Why now? Why you? Why this version? Why should anyone care enough to switch, pay, share, trust, or return? What is the real pain? What is the real behavior? What does the customer already believe, and where does this idea attach itself to that belief?


The problem becomes complex pretty quick. When do you rely on true human output? When do you fully automate a process? When does speed help the company, and when does it strip the company of the very thing that made it worth paying attention to? When should the founder use A.I. to move faster, and when should they slow down because the decision requires taste, context, or emotional intelligence?


These become deep strategic questions that fundamentally alter every detail of the business. This is why the competence line is able to move so freely: when it does, layers of abstraction also get piled onto whatever is above it. A simple version of this already exists in software. A person writes in a high-level language, which gets translated downward through layers they rarely see: frameworks, JavaScript, assembly, machine code, electricity. The higher you sit on the stack, the more powerful the tools feel, but the less direct contact you have with what is actually happening underneath.


A.I. creates a similar condition for founders. It lets them operate higher up the stack of business, using complex systems to carry out work that used to require direct skill, time, or technical understanding. This is incredibly powerful, but it also means the founder is making decisions farther away from the ground. It stops becoming a first-order thinking exercise and starts becoming a third-order thinking equation. You have to think further into the future, analyze the ripple effects that emerge, and understand with incredible accuracy what is actually important and what is not. This is no longer what makes you a world-class founder. It is what is required to simply stay above the line.


This is the new problem. The layers of abstraction pile up as the competence line moves.

Conclusion

Conclusion

Artificial intelligence is moving the line of competence to places we have never seen before. Accessibility is becoming widespread, and the modern version of the market is shifting beneath our feet. As intelligence improves, the line will move again, stacking more layers of abstraction on top of it and requiring more high-level strategic human thinking to utilize the line correctly. We will see an explosion of horrible ideas, weak brands, flimsy companies, and worthless projects. We will also see a steady increase in great, valuable companies. This is the law of the market. Everything is priced in, as all things should be.


The advantage becomes this complex mess of deep characteristics that sit at the edge of dozens of unrelated disciplines. It belongs to the person who can see clearly, choose carefully, and understand what matters before the room agrees. The market looks like an absolute mess from an outsider’s perspective. Nothing is stable, everything is shifting, people are going rich and poor at incredible rates. But look closer, and you’ll find it is the same as it has always been.


He who understands where the line is moving before the market does will win.

Artificial intelligence is moving the line of competence to places we have never seen before. Accessibility is becoming widespread, and the modern version of the market is shifting beneath our feet. As intelligence improves, the line will move again, stacking more layers of abstraction on top of it and requiring more high-level strategic human thinking to utilize the line correctly. We will see an explosion of horrible ideas, weak brands, flimsy companies, and worthless projects. We will also see a steady increase in great, valuable companies. This is the law of the market. Everything is priced in, as all things should be.


The advantage becomes this complex mess of deep characteristics that sit at the edge of dozens of unrelated disciplines. It belongs to the person who can see clearly, choose carefully, and understand what matters before the room agrees. The market looks like an absolute mess from an outsider’s perspective. Nothing is stable, everything is shifting, people are going rich and poor at incredible rates. But look closer, and you’ll find it is the same as it has always been.


He who understands where the line is moving before the market does will win.

8 minute read