Do you have a link to that?
Then in the 00s, the computing resources became widely available. The bottleneck was the people who could build interesting things. Imagine a third world country with access to AWS but no access to developers who could build something meaningful.
With these models, now these geographically distributed companies can build similarly high quality stuff.
R1 IS the example of something that previously only could be built in the bowels of large SV corporations.
Nobody was “destroyed” - a handful of companies had their stock price drop, a couple had big drops, but most of those stocks are up today, showing that the market is reactionary.
The point still is: Software/engineering is no longer the moat creator.
Notice how Apple and Meta stocks went up last 2 days?
Apple has a non-software moat: Their devices.
Meta has a non-software moat: their sticky users.
So does Microsoft, and Google to an extent with their non-software moat.
But how did they build the most in the first place? With software that only they could develop, at a pace that only they could execute, all because of the people they could hoard.
The companies of the future can disrupt all of them (maybe not apple) very quickly by just developing the same things as say Meta and "at the same quality" but for cheaper. The engineers moat is gone. The only moat meta has is network effects. That's one less barrier for a competing company to deal with.
This is a key insight - the trade has changed.
For a long time, hoarding talent - who could conceive and implement such PRs - was a competitive advantage. It no longer is because companies can hire and get similar outcomes, with fewer and mediocre devs.
But at the same time, these companies have lost their technological moat. The people were the biggest moat. The hoarding of people were the reason why SV could stay ahead of other concentrated geographies. This is why SV companies grew larger and larger.
But now, anyone anywhere can produce anything and literally demolish any competitive advantage of large companies. As an example, literally a single Deepseek release yesterday destroyed large market cap companies.
It means that the future world is likely to have a large number of geographically distributed developers, always competing, and the large companies will have to shed market cap because their customers will be distributed among this competition.
It's not going to be pleasant. Life and work will change but it is not merely loss of jobs but it is going to be loss of the large corporation paradigm.