We are witnessing a quiet revolution in the division of labor within the DeFi sector.

Over the past few years, the core barriers in the industry have been “whether you can write code” and “whether you understand protocols.”
Whoever could piece together complex strategies with smart contracts held the advantage.

But now, things are starting to change.
The emergence of “intent-driven” models, represented by @Infinit_Labs, marks the beginning of a new phase:
Complex on-chain execution is becoming a standardized, outsourceable “infrastructure” service.

This is much like the history of electricity.
In the early days, every factory had to build its own generator; that was part of its core competitiveness.
Later, the power grid emerged, and electricity became a plug-and-play public good.
At this point, a factory’s competitive edge was no longer “whether it could generate electricity,” but “how to use electricity to produce better products.”

The same is true for DeFi.
When AI agents can turn operations like “cross-protocol arbitrage” and “multi-step leveraged staking” into services callable by a single instruction, the dimension of competition for the entire game is elevated.
The competition among top players will be entirely focused on:
Who has a more unique market intuition?
Who can design more sophisticated risk-hedging structures that machines have yet to popularize?
Who has a more advanced prediction of macro liquidity?

Technology steps into the background;
Cognition comes to the forefront.
This is the necessary path for DeFi to mature.