Robert Ta argues that rubrics—structured evaluation criteria—are the main competitive advantage for AI builders. As orchestration tools become easier to copy, companies that codify their domain expertise into rubrics, annotations, and system prompts will capture value competitors can't replicate. Treat rubrics as first-class assets that preserve accumulated human judgment.
Rubrics are your moat amongst all the metas changing. If you accumulate tacit knowledge and compound your intelligence in your domain-specific workflows, economically valuable workflows that are niche, like other people aren't using these outside of your industry, for example, rubrics are where that goes. And so one way to think about this for everybody that doesn't understand harnesses or evals is remember when you were in English class and your teacher had to grade you and maybe 30 or 40 other students or whatever on an essay. And an essay is quite subjective. We kind of know good writing when we see it versus bad writing. But to grade 30 students and 45 students and get their parents to be on board with fairness, what do you do? You have a grading rubric, you put it out there, and you're like, here's how I'm going to rate your essay. How well did you make the argument? You get a certain amount of points. How good was the grammar? Were there a certain amount of mistakes, like under a threshold or over a threshold? Did you have a good bibliography? What does that look like? The formatting, how many sentences? Like, those things are what we mean by a rubric. So a coding agent's rubric— what Claude Code and Codex compete on is They have people doing annotations, building evals, evolving their rubrics and their system prompts over time for these harnesses. And they're constantly evaluating what makes a good PR and how do we drive technical outcomes and business outcomes from that and improve the development experience in using these coding agents. So that's how they're competing. The meta is going to change where probably orchestration is going to get a lot easier. That's what this is telling us. Less is now more. Really where you should be concentrating your compounding effort on your team, if you're an AI builder or a founder, is the rubrics. So version them, keep them first-class citizen assets to your company, because I think that's where the judgment and taste from all your humans accumulate towards whatever product or experience or service you deliver in market.
