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Comment by toraway | Hacker News Reader

What kind of barrier/moat/network effects/etc would prevent someone with a Claude Code subscription from replicating whatever "innovation" is so uniquely valuable here?

It's somewhat strange to regularly read HN threads confidently asserting that the cost of software is trending towards zero and software engineering as a profession is dead, but also that an AI dev tool that basically hooks onto Git/Claude Code/terminal session history is worth multiples of $60+ million dollars.

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There’s a difference between “this concept has value” and “a company can capture that value”.

I do see value in this, but like you I think it’s too trivial to implement to capture the value unless they can get some kind of lead on a model that can consume these artifacts more effectively. It feels like something Anthropic will have in Claude Code in a month.

GitHub doesn't have a "moat" either besides network effect. Just like most SaaS.

And it was sold to Microsoft at $7B.

Mostly because "Microsoft <3 FOSS" phase, and what better manouver than owning Github and dump Codeplex?

Look at Xamarin, almost everything that they had is now gone in modern .NET.

Well that was in the era of free money for one. And the primary value was in all the human made content for AI training.

I’m sure there’d be some value to extract from the agent produced code in this thing, but I doubt it’s anywhere near as much.

If they had wanted a moat for this part of their offering, they wouldn’t have open-sourced it.

This is not their offering, this is a tool to raise interest.

There's no way this company is just a few git and claude hooks with a CLI. They're definitely working on a SASS - something else that isn't open source that this primitive is the basis of. Like a GitHub for agent code

Impressive seeing as last week we heard that AI had killed SAAS.

haha

github for agent code is dropbox final_final2.zip

> What kind of barrier/moat/network effects/etc would prevent someone with a Claude Code subscription from replicating whatever "innovation" is so uniquely valuable here?

You are correct, that isn't the moat. Writing the software is the easy part

The same moat that git had on svn, a better mental paradigm over the same fundamental system, more suited to how SWE changed over a decade.

git didn't succeed based on the mental model. It got a foot in the door with better tooling and developer experience then blew the door open when GitHub found a way to productize it.

Git doesn't have a moat. Git isn't commercial software, and doesn't need to strong arm you into accepting bad license terms.

I wouldn’t characterize it as a moat exactly. svn/cvs just had a braindead data model. Linus started git with a fundamentally better one.

I definitely see the potential of AI-native version control, it will take a bit more to convince me this is a similar step-level improvement though.

> HN threads confidently asserting

I have never seen any thread that unanimously asserts this. Even if they do, having HN/reddit asserting something as evidence is wrong way to look at things.

  > if you can't see the value in this, I don't know what to tell you

Okay, but I'm legitimately unclear on the argument for $60M - $300M value here, given it isn't articulated at all.

HN is full of AI agents hype posts. I am yet to see legitimate and functional agent orchestration solving real problems, whether it is scale or velocity.

You're confused. If you hype AI here you lose karma.

The top comment here is one by straydusk. Their profile says: data expert, AI explorer.

HN is full of anti hype posts as well. If I were to estimate there are more posts of anti hype than of hype.

This comment feels word-for-word the legendary DropBox critique on HN.

It was only legendary because DropBox hit it out of the park. In hindsight it is easy to see this. And it's the default HN response to anything.

A broken forum is right twice a day

I sort of agree with you. But the sentiment reminds me of the hacker news dropbox launch response. Which was pretty much

"pfft! I could set all this up myself with a NAS xyz".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

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