I wrote an article about this a few days ago that has been gaining a lot of traction: https://finbarr.site/2026/02/12/in-defense-of-saas.html

Point solutions are going to be free. Complex systems with support, integrations, switching costs, customer data, etc., are not going to be free.

Those platforms with a moat have some breathing room but it's only a matter of time. Remember Lotus Notes?

> This is the same dynamic that kept IBM dominant for decades

IBM still sells mainframes but is no longer a growth darling.

> Markets are right to reassess multiples. But reassessing multiples is very different from pricing in extinction

What you are missing is that the SaaS companies were extremely overpriced. For instance, crm after all the carnage is still priced at 25 times earnings which is historically high for anything that is not a growth company. The perception was that these companies would print money year after year selling software trinkets on their platforms and as such were placed in the growth category. Now, it is plainly obvious that these software trinkets can be produced easily by anyone using AI. Their pricing-power has dramatically declined. Hence the re-rating. None of this contradicts the thesis in your ai-assisted article that these businesses have moats just like IBM and its mainframes. These businesses are now in a vicious reflexive narrative loop where the narrative will impact the real-world which will further fuel the narrative.

AI refusals are fascinating to me. Claude refused to build me a news scraper that would post political hot takes to twitter. But it would happily build a political news scraper. And it would happily build a twitter poster.

Side note: I wanted to build this so anyone could choose to protect themselves against being accused of having failed to take a stand on the “important issues” of the day. Just choose your political leaning and the AI would consult the correct echo chambers to repeat from.

The thought that someone would feel comforted by having automated software summarise the output of what is likely the output of automated software and publishing it under their name to impress other humans is so alien to me.

The whole idea was a bit of a joke and a reflection on how ridiculous it is that people get in trouble for failing to regurgitate the correct takes when certain events occur. It’s like insurance against getting canceled.

> Claude refused to build me a news scraper that would post political hot takes to twitter

> Just choose your political leaning and the AI would consult the correct echo chambers to repeat from.

You're effectively asking it to build a social media political manipulation bot, behaviorally identical to the bots that propagandists would create. Shows that those guardrails can be ineffective and trivial to bypass.

> Good illustration that those guardrails are ineffective and trivial to bypass.

Is that genuinely surprising to anyone? The same applies to humans, really—if they don't see the full picture, and their individual contribution seems harmless, they will mostly do as told. Asking critical questions is a rare trait.

I would argue its completely futile to even work on guardrails, if defeating them is just a matter of reframing the task in an infinite number of ways.

> I would argue its completely futile to even work on guardrails

Maybe if humans were the only ones prompting AI models

Sounds like your daily interactions with Legal. Each time a different take.

"maybe even a high production value promo video showcasing happy employees, rare wood office counters and a shoes-off policy."

Don't forget surfboards!

This was a great post, Alex. Thanks for sharing! Hunger and high agency are such important traits in every startup hire.

Thank you! I wanted to mention toasted coconut flake snacks as well, but the sentence was long enough already. If your company has those in the kitchenette, you're definitely well-capitalized.

And yeah, high agency is really trendy at this moment in the startup sphere, but hunger is not talked about enough IMO. Maybe because it's too obvious to be even worth mentioning.

It uses a service called the game crafter.

That’s just the cost of the print on demand service. We’re not trying to make any profits or a real business here.

Running in a VM certainly has some benefits (particularly the ability to run docker inside of it easily). Last week I shared https://github.com/finbarr/yolobox which takes the docker approach (nearly 400 github stars already and quite a few improvements shipped in the last week).

Yes, this feature has now been added with a --no-yolo flag.

I'd recommend trying Gemini for the escapes. Claude was quite superficial and only appeared to be trying to break out at the surface level. Gemini was very creative and has come up with a whole sequence of escapes that is making me rethink whether I should even be trying to patch them, given preventing agent escapes isn't a stated goal of the project.

That's an excellent idea! I will give it a shot.

You may be right. I plan to try out some remote approaches. What I'd like to do with yolobox is nail the image for vibe coding with all of the tools and config copying working flawlessly. Then it can be run remotely or locally.

Yes this is definitely an area I'm interested in exploring.

I wrote a blog post with my setup: https://skybrian.substack.com/p/backseat-coding-with-a-ghost...