Agents are shrinking the gap between “I want this done” and “done.” Mid-tier SaaS whose moat was “hard to build” is feeling the squeeze.
The story
AI-ish tells: tidy phases, repeated claim-then-forecast rhythm, market words like “moat,” abstract phrases like “interface layer,” and a promo close feeling stapled on.
What if the apps you’re building are the horse-drawn carriages of 2027?
I keep chewing on this, and it keeps chewing back. Software existed because turning “I want this done” into “this is done” took forms, dashboards, buttons, and monthly fees. A tiny obstacle course. Yay.
Agents are shrinking the gap.
Coding tools are already lowering the bar. The work is moving from typing every line like a cave wizard to saying what you want, then checking the machine’s homework.
This gets spicy for SaaS people. A lot of mid-tier tools – project trackers, form builders, light CRMs, internal dashboards – had one main advantage: making them was annoying. If a small team can build its own tool in an afternoon, paying forever for generic workflow boxes starts feeling silly.
Then come the agents: OpenAI Operator, Perplexity Assistant, Claude Computer Use. These aren’t apps you poke around in. They’re things you give a job to.
The weird question: if an agent can finish the task, why open an app meant to help you finish the task? Instead of wrestling expenses in a spreadsheet like a raccoon in a hoodie, you ask an agent to track them and flag the funky stuff. The screen gets thinner.
Software isn’t vanishing. Tools with strong communities, private data, or legal walls around them have a better shot. But tools whose superpower was “this was hard to build”? Those are feeling squeezed.
I wrote the full rant, “The Extinction of Software,” at clearsay.net. I also built a free tool, AgentAutoFlow, to handle some heavy lifting. What are you seeing from your end?
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