For one thing, the threat model assumes customers can build their own tools. Our end users can't. Their current "system" is Excel. The big enterprises that employ them have thousands of devs, but two of them explicitly cloned our product and tried to poach their own users onto it. One gave up. The other's users tell us it's crap. We've lost zero paying subscribers to free internal alternatives.
I believe that agents are a multiplier on existing velocity, not an equalizer. We use agents heavily and ship faster than ever. We get a lot of feedback from users as to what the internal tech teams are shipping and based on this there's little evidence of any increase in velocity from them.
The bottleneck is still knowing what to build, not building. A lot of the value in our product is in decisions users don't even know we made for them. Domain expertise + tight feedback loop with users can't be replicated by an internal developer in an afternoon.
Development tooling improvements usually are a temporary advantage end up being table stakes after a bit of time. I'm more worried that as agentic tooling gets better it obsoletes a lot of SaaS tools where SaaS vendors count on users driving conventional point and click apps (web, mobile and otherwise). I'm encouraging the companies I'm involved with to look to moving to more communication driven microexperience UIs - email, slack, sms, etc instead of more conventional UI.
None of these people can apparently see beyond the tip of their nose. It doesn't matter if it takes a year, or three years, or five years, or ten years. Nothing can stop what's about to happen. If it takes ten years, so what, it's all going to get smashed and turned upside down. These agents will get a lot better over just the next three years. Ten years? Ha.
It's the personal interest bias that's tilting the time fog, it's desperation / wilful blindness. Millions of highly paid people with their livelihoods being disrupted rapidly, in full denial about what the world looks like just a few years out, so they shift the time thought markers to months or a year - which reveals just how fast this is all moving.
Buyer pressure will eventually force process updates, but it is a slow burn. The bottleneck is rarely the tech or the partner, it's the internal culture. The software moves fast, but the people deeply integrated into physical infrastructure move 10x slower than you'd expect.
> people deeply integrated into physical infrastructure move 10x slower than you'd expect.
My experience is yes, to move everyone. To do a pilot and prove the value? That's doable quickly, and if the pilot succeeds, the rest is fast.