I'm old enough to remember the arrival of RDBMS, once IBM primed the space with DB2.

There was a pitched battle over features like row-level locking as competitors like Sybase, Ingress and Oracle scrapped it out. New features arrived on a monthly cadence, with immense engineering effort behind them. The winners (Oracle mostly) won a great moat which led to them to where they are today.

The fact that so many AI companies can produce amazing coding tools so quickly shows there is no moat, supporting your theory.