For two decades, the Silicon Valley imperative was: ideas are worthless, execution is everything. Vision was never scarce. The differentiating factor was grinding implementation. Building was hard. Difficulty created value.
AI agents have changed this.
Anyone can describe an idea and have working code hours later. Stack Overflow traffic has fallen to launch-month levels because nobody needs to ask anymore. The constraint that defined software economics for fifty years is evaporating.
If execution is no longer scarce, what is?
The obvious answer is "nothing changes, just faster." Wrong. When constraints shift, efficiency unlocks new use cases and total consumption expands. Not fewer apps, but more. Fleeting micro-apps solving hyper-specific problems. The cost of building the wrong thing has dropped low enough that we'll build everything, including mountains of things that shouldn't exist.
Peter Drucker said "culture eats strategy for breakfast." Startups spun this into "execution eats strategy for breakfast." Move fast. Break things. But that only held when execution was hard.
When everyone can execute, the pendulum swings back. Judgment about what should exist becomes the scarce resource. Not ideas as casual thoughts, but problem selection, taste, the discipline to choose wisely when you can build anything. Most things that can be built shouldn't be.
The old world forced deliberation through friction. You couldn't afford six months building the wrong thing. That constraint (mostly) protected us from poor judgment. Now discipline must be internal.
What becomes valuable: not speed of building (everyone has that), but speed of learning. How fast you cycle through build, learn, adapt. Distribution. Who people encounter first, who they trust. The network you can activate, not the codebase you can generate.
Deep technical mastery and architectural sophistication are becoming table everything or irrelevant. Builders who thrive will be the ones who identify right problems and know what not to build.
Execution still matters. But it's no longer sufficient. The code was never the point. We just couldn't see that until code became free.