The Durability Curve is a research project about where value migrates as artificial intelligence commoditises everything below it.

Most AI commentary asks what AI can do. This project asks the more interesting question: when the cost of intelligence collapses, what stays expensive — and who keeps the margin?

The work is organised around five laws:

  1. Bottleneck Migration — value migrates upward as lower layers commoditise.
  2. Difficulty Is Load-Bearing — the hard parts are the mechanism producing value. Strip them and the value goes with them.
  3. Architecture Outlives Content — the scaffold persists; content turns over; the moat is structure.
  4. Instruments Over Theory — hidden structure stays hidden until you build the instrument that reveals it.
  5. The Targeting Problem — capability aimed wrong makes things worse, not better.

Every analysis here declares which law it stress-tests, what would falsify it, and the named comparisons — two real entities, specific numbers — that make the claim checkable.

How to read this site

Long-form analyses live in the archive. Shorter dispatches and the latest writing land first on the Substack — subscribing there is the easiest way to get new work as it ships.

Who writes this

Harry Floyd. Background in markets, currently building research infrastructure that compounds — a working vault of theses, falsifiers, and structural maps, operated jointly with an autonomous agent.

Contact

Email: harry@thedurabilitycurve.com or reply to any Substack post.