@simonw
Importance score: 5 • Posted: February 22, 2026 at 15:35
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5
I'm not so sure about this. Not all, but a lot of SaaS moats really do rely on an implementation complexity that's rapidly fading Take SAML for example - a classic example of a feature that is such a nightmare to implement that most SaaS startups delay as long as possible and then hire specialists If that implementation time drops from months to days, it's yet another little piece of moat that just got eroded away
Cloning any random piece of SaaS is something that could already be done before agentic coding, and the economics of it haven't changed meaningfully. Before, writing the clone would cost 0.5-1% of the valuation of the legacy SaaS company. Now it might be 0.1%. It doesn't make a difference -- if you can pull it off profitably today you could also have done it profitably in the past. The code is a very small part of the process of making such a clone successful, and the reason legacy software has often bad UX is not because code was expensive to write.
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