Capital & Code · Personal capacity
The verification economy, in essays.
Capital & Code is my newsletter on what happens to finance, accounting, and professional work when production is free and verification becomes the scarce skill.
New issues land most weeks. Everything I've published is collected below, newest first — the running argument, in one place.
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Capital & Code
What happens to finance, accounting, and professional work when producing the analysis is nearly free — and the durable value moves to whoever can tell whether it's right, defensible, and worth acting on.
“Production is cheap. Verification is the scarce skill.”
Subscribe on Substack →Eleven issues · newest first
What the Certification Still Certifies
Frontier models now pass the CFA's hardest mock exams in minutes. The credential's gate has to move from recall to live, defended judgement.
Read the essay →The Signature Is the Moat
AI can produce the work, but it cannot answer for it. The sign-off — where liability lands — is the durable human position in finance.
Read the essay →Everyone's Using the Same Brain
Nearly every firm now rents the same few models — and reaches the same answers. In a market, that is not an edge. It is a crowd.
Read the essay →The Chart Was Never the Hard Part
AI has erased the technical work of building the chart, exposing that the real skill was never the drawing. It was deciding what to show, how to frame it honestly, and what a misleading version would quietly leave out.
Read the essay →The Apprenticeship Problem
If AI does the junior work, where do seniors come from? The profession's training pipeline is the quiet casualty of cheap production.
Read the essay →The Data You Can't Paste
When every firm rents the same intelligence, the durable edge is the proprietary, context-bound data a competitor can't buy, copy, or paste.
Read the essay →The Better the Model, the Worse the Reviewer
A model that's right 98% of the time trains its reviewer to stop reviewing — right as the remaining errors turn subtler and more expensive to miss.
Read the essay →The Verification Economy
Production is collapsing in cost, but trust still has to be manufactured. Verification is becoming firm-level infrastructure.
Read the essay →The Analyst Becomes the Reviewer
The defensible skill is shifting from producing the analysis to reviewing the machine that produces it — and almost no one was trained for it.
Read the essay →The Spreadsheet Isn't Dying — It's Becoming Autonomous
Every wave of enterprise software promised to replace the spreadsheet; AI is the first that changes what it is.
Read the essay →The Non-Coder's New Superpower
AI coding agents give finance professionals the leverage of an engineering team — and organisational inertia, not price, is the real barrier.
Read the essay →On LinkedIn · Capital & Code
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