Moats are not going away. they are moving.

Moats are not going away. They are moving.

Andreessen Horowitz recently made the point that the value of software was never “the code itself.”

What changes in the era of vibe coding is where the defensibility sits.

As software creation becomes cheaper, feature-level advantage becomes less durable. Switching costs that relied mainly on implementation effort or migration pain also weaken when agents can take on more of that work.

That is why “we shipped it first” is degrading as a moat.

Restaurant software is a good example.
A standalone app for bookings, scheduling, or reporting is becoming easier to replicate. Toast is harder to displace for a different reason. Its strength comes from being embedded in the operating core through POS, payments, digital ordering, team management, hardware, and benchmarking powered by data from that network.

Not prettier software. Better position.

So the right question for a startup in the era of vibe coding is not:

How hard is this to build?

It is:
What compounds after it is built?

That is what a real Moat Map should answer.

Not a slogan about defensibility.
A concrete plan for how your company becomes harder to replace even as it becomes easier to copy.

That means:
Owning a workflow where failure is costly,
sitting on the transaction or approval path,
aggregating proprietary benchmark data or network context,
building an ecosystem others build careers and businesses around,
and aligning pricing to outcomes instead of access.

The next moat is not code scarcity.
It is compounding position.