A durable competitive barrier; in 2026 frontier AI, most defensibility still sits on the model side rather than in the application layer.
Tensions
Yao Shunyu observes that no scenario has yet formed a real data flywheel, and apart from agentic coding no purely AI-native application has become highly successful, so a thin wrapper (壳) survives only by outrunning the labs to user mindshare or by staying in a market too small for them to bother with. This sits in tension with the application-layer optimism common among founders.