Q. Who counts as great talent? A. If you know clearly what you want, the fastest, easiest, and eventually cheapest move is to hire someone who has already built that same thing twice at previous companies and have them build it a third time.
Q. How should we approach this? A. If it is something nobody in the world has done before, build it three times quickly. The masterpiece usually comes on the third attempt. Think of the first two as tuition.
Q. Then who is a good developer? A. Same answer. Developers who are building the same kind of thing for the third time tend to be good. A senior is someone who has already built most of what a service needs once or twice before.
Q. Why not the fourth time? A. In many cases, people make something really well on the third try, and from the fourth time onward they want to do something else. It stops being fun and starts feeling repetitive.
I work with coding agents this way too. If I have never done something before and it is hard enough, I stay close and do it three times with them. It usually takes a day or two. After that, I know how to assign the work and which agents + skills I can actually trust. Even that so-called "one-click magic" often comes from people who have already internalized this whole process so deeply that it feels natural.