Their moat looks pretty thin. A VSCode fork with an open-source LLM fork on top. In the fast-moving coding-agent market, it’s not obvious they keep their massive valuation forever.
but it never occurred to me that, if true, of course the harness becomes increasingly more important. which feels absolutely correct of course.
not sure if the hypothesis is even true though.
Their value is in the data they've collected and are collecting. Usage, acceptance rate, and all the connected signals. Plus having a large userbase where they can A / B test any finetune they create.
People home about Teams sucking, but its market share is several times that of Slack because of distribution.
I guarantee that Microsoft has even more data.
Obviously we're running both, using the right tool for the job.
There is stickiness there from being early. That will be hard to replicate.