Comment by evilduck

I think you could both be right at the same time. We will see a large number of VC funded AI startup companies and feature clones vanish soon, and we will also see current or future LLMs continue to make inroads into existing business processes and increase productivity and profitability.

Personally, I think what we will witness is consolidation and winner-takes-all scenarios. There just isn't a sustainable market for 15 VS Code forks all copying each other along with all other non-VS Code IDEs cloning those features in as fast as possible. There isn't space for Claude Code, Gemini CLI, Qwen Code, Opencode all doing basically the same thing with their special branding when the thing they're actually selling is a commoditized LLM API. Hell, there _probably_ isn't space for OpenAI and Anthropic and Google and Mistral and DeepSeek and Alibaba and whoever else, all fundamentally creating and doing the same thing globally. Every single software vendor can't innovate and integrate AI features faster than AI companies themselves can build better tooling to automate that company's tools for them. It reeks of the 90's when there were a dozen totally viable but roughly equal search engines. One vendor will eventually pull ahead or have a slightly longer runway and claim the whole thing.