Comment by jcgrillo

If an AI agent ever became as productive at writing code as a well-organized 20 person engineering team you'd still need to run it for a year or more to replicate any nontrivial SaaS product.

And the thing about many of these products isn't their feature set, it's their stability. It's their uptime. It's how they handle scaling invisibly and with no effort on your part. These are things you can't just write down from whole cloth, they are properties that emerge over time by adapting the the reality of scale. Coding isn't the whole deal, and your 20x clanker which can do nothing but re-arrange text in interesting patterns is going to have some trouble with the realities of taking that PoC to production. You'll still need experienced, capable people for that. And lots of time.

A lot of this "ermahgerd everything will change" drivel is based on some magical fundamentally new technology emerging in the near future that can do things that LLMs cannot do. But as far as anyone knows, that future may be never.

So even given a large improvement in agentic coding I'm not convinced it really changes the build vs buy equation much.