What kind of barrier/moat/network effects/etc would prevent someone with a Claude Code subscription from replicating whatever "innovation" is so uniquely valuable here?
It's somewhat strange to regularly read HN threads confidently asserting that the cost of software is trending towards zero and software engineering as a profession is dead, but also that an AI dev tool that basically hooks onto Git/Claude Code/terminal session history is worth multiples of $60+ million dollars.
This comment feels word-for-word the legendary DropBox critique on HN.
I built a basic copy with about an hour with my own "platform for ai agents" that I built out over the last week: https://github.com/jwbron/egg/pull/504, and refined it here: https://github.com/jwbron/egg/pull/517 (though right after I merged this I blew through my weekly token quota for my second claude max 20x account so I haven't been able to test it out yet).
I think your point is valid and I've been having the same thoughts. My tooling is still in the experimental phase, but I can move so quickly that I'm having trouble grasping how products like this will survive. If I can build this out in a week and copy an idea like this one (which is a great one, mind you) in an hour, what's the value of paying someone for a product like this vs just building it myself?
If they had wanted a moat for this part of their offering, they wouldn’t have open-sourced it.
This is not their offering, this is a tool to raise interest.
> What kind of barrier/moat/network effects/etc would prevent someone with a Claude Code subscription from replicating whatever "innovation" is so uniquely valuable here?
You are correct, that isn't the moat. Writing the software is the easy part
The same moat that git had on svn, a better mental paradigm over the same fundamental system, more suited to how SWE changed over a decade.
git didn't succeed based on the mental model. It got a foot in the door with better tooling and developer experience then blew the door open when GitHub found a way to productize it.
Git doesn't have a moat. Git isn't commercial software, and doesn't need to strong arm you into accepting bad license terms.
> HN threads confidently asserting
I have never seen any thread that unanimously asserts this. Even if they do, having HN/reddit asserting something as evidence is wrong way to look at things.
HN is full of AI agents hype posts. I am yet to see legitimate and functional agent orchestration solving real problems, whether it is scale or velocity.
HN is full of anti hype posts as well. If I were to estimate there are more posts of anti hype than of hype.