Comment by wslh
5 days ago
Asking for a friend who’s working on a startup around this general space: do you think it’s better to go niche, focusing on agents for a specific type of application or a specific language/ecosystem, or is that effectively “killing the startup” by limiting market size too soon?
Another question that came up in conversations with them: there might be value in offering a nonscalable, high-touch service, where you build and maintain customized agents tailored to a client’s specific codebase on a periodic basis.
I think it's probably a bad idea to do an "AI looking for vulnerabilities" startup, since the frontier labs have all basically declared that they believe that's a feature of a coding agent and not a standalone product.
BTW, more discussions around this topic are flourishing: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/kirill-balakhonov_claude-code...
I agree that it will be difficult to compete with frontier labs if they declared it as part of their core business.
No dog in this fight but the frontier labs might suck at marketing to such customers, and such at servicing their needs.
I think so, and also the startup is not about scaling massively. It is about adding value (customizing security AI for specific codebases).