TL;DR: The AI era has violently decoupled "value creation" from "value capture." Writing the perfect Prompt or Skill might create immense value, but because it happens on the platform's servers, you can't charge for it. Worse, you are actively training your own replacement. The true moat lies in the physical, relational, and judgment-based "opposites" of AI.
If you are an entrepreneur or developer gearing up for the AI era, you are likely obsessing over one thing: how to write the most exquisite prompt or package a specific workflow into the perfect AI Skill (or agent).
But this is a brutal commercial trap.
In today's technological ecosystem, no matter how brilliantly you write AI prompts or skills, you will never build a commercial moat. In fact, the better you get, the faster you obsolete yourself.
1. The Fatal Rupture: Value Creation ≠ Value Capture
In the traditional software era, "value creation" and "value capture" were naturally tethered. If you developed Photoshop, your code and installation package were your moat. If you built a SaaS product, every click routed through your servers, allowing you to legitimately set up a tollbooth.
In the AI era, this tether has been violently severed.
When you compress decades of industry experience into a perfectly crafted thousands-word prompt and package it into a Skill, you indeed create massive value. But the critical question is: Where does this value occur?
It happens within the API calls of large model providers like OpenAI or Anthropic. You created the value, but you cannot set up a tollbooth where that value is generated. Your "perfect product" is merely a string of plaintext with a replication cost of exactly zero. Once it's published or sold, the very first buyer can flip it onto GitHub. Skills obliterate the profit margins across the entire value chain, yet as the creator, you inherit none of that revenue.
2. The Parasite's Elegy: You Are Consuming Yourself
What’s even more dangerous than not making money is the fragility of this survival structure.
Today's Prompt Engineers and open-source Skill developers who rely on large model platforms face a profound vulnerability. You depend on the platform's computing ecosystem for distribution and a sense of achievement. You work day and night to fine-tune the compute and models, believing you are building your own assets. But in reality, you are making your tacit knowledge explicit, feeding it for free into the platform's data flywheel.
The moment the platform releases a minor underlying update—such as natively supporting a feature you painstakingly hand-coded—your entire business model evaporates overnight. This is "self-consumption": the more you optimize the system, the faster you accelerate the platform's ability to replace you.
You are not just dependent on the platform; you are actively feeding the predator that will eventually consume you.
3. The Way Out: Build Tollbooths in the "Opposites" of AI
Since it is impossible to capture value on AI's home turf (generation and compression), the only way out is to run to the extreme opposites where AI can never reach and set up your tollbooths there.
As AI makes the generation of all digital content, code, and images hyper-abundant and dirt cheap, true scarcity has migrated to these four domains:
- Relationships: AI can generate ten thousand perfect weekly reports, but it cannot generate long-term trust and emotional bonds between humans.
- The Present: AI possesses oceans of historical training data, but it severely lacks an awareness of the physical reality happening right now.
- The Physical World: The marginal cost of the bit world is approaching zero, but at the atomic level—offline meetings, medical surgeries, signing legal documents to bear responsibility—execution cannot be replaced by AI.
- Taste & Judgment: When everyone can instantly generate a hundred proposals, the most scarce ability becomes "making the call"—deciding what is truly good and worth executing.
Conclusion: Let Skills Be Your Weapon, Not Your Merchandise
Stop trying to build a business model on layers where AI can endlessly replicate.
Release your Prompts and Skills to the wild. Open-source them, make them free, and let everyone use them. Because a Skill is a business card, not a product. Business cards don’t make money, but you can use these hyper-optimized Skills as your personal "weapons."
Others use weapons to show off how sharp they are; you should use these weapons to win real battles taking place in the physical world, relationship networks, and zones of responsible judgment. The battles you win—those are your true sources of profit.
