What stays scarce when making things gets cheap?

An open question, not a conclusion.

A great deal of what used to need a team (writing code, analysing a market, designing a page) now needs one person and a set of capable tools. If that continues, the ability to produce stops being the scarce thing. Something else has to carry the value.

These are the candidates I am testing, roughly in the order I trust them:

• Trust and reputation. People still need to know who stands behind something.
• Distribution. A legitimate, direct relationship with the people you serve.
• Physical-world execution. Kitchens, vans, villages and deliveries do not compress the way software does.
• Accountability. Someone who answers when it goes wrong.
• Taste and problem selection. Choosing what is worth making at all.
• Deep integration into how real work is actually done.
• Ownership of useful assets and durable relationships.
• Communities and experiences people genuinely value.

None of these is automatically defensible. Distribution can be bought, trust can be faked for a while, and taste is easy to claim. The projects in Build and Lab are partly ways of finding out which of these hold up.