The big assumption with all of these sorts of analyses is that things will continue as they are for the foreseeable future.

In hype-driven markets, you cannot be certain of that.

Let's take a view that the author is right: coding agents and their associated harnesses were the inflection point for some degree of profitability and widespread consumption, and that these tools are now yet another SaaS subscription or API bucket expense to bake into every single developer (or developer-adjacent) in the organization alongside your collab suite, HR seat, CRM seat, design seat, etc. To be fair I honestly think that's a safe assumption to make for highly technical firms whose image is derived from remaining on the cutting edge of things.

That begs the following questions, which we won't know until IPOs start happening:

* Are subscriptions profitable, or just API consumption?

* What's the run rate when we just consider subscription-based usage like Claude Code and Codex? What about API calls?

* Is there any profitable pathway forward at which enterprises can get unlimited usage but at fixed rates via subscription?

* What does customer churn look like for subscription users versus API users?

We also have a number of questions for customers that I suspect we'll start seeing receipts for in the coming months, at least from the early adopters:

* What was the net gain (loss) from leveraging coding agents?

* What's the cost of a developer with or without access to a coding agent + harness? Is it cheaper to hire an outsourced worker with a coding agent subscription, or a domestic worker without one?

* At what point does further AI spend result in diminishing returns, i.e. where's the 'sweet spot' for spend?

* Did AI boost actual revenue and outcomes, or did it just gamify KPIs?

* What roles or work did AI actually replace, versus merely displace during the hype cycle?

All of these will influence the long tail of this bubble, because it is a bubble at this point. Even if these companies are indeed profitable thanks to the coding agent inflection point, there's still so many unanswered questions about utility beyond coding that it's impossible to extrapolate a future. If coding agents are indeed the extent of utility for profitability, then there's no possible way these entities will recoup the investment already sunk into their infrastructure buildouts. Even if more profitable uses are discovered, does this offset or replace the firms disappearing due to AI speculation and their associated contributions to the economy as a whole (RE: the consumer compute industry at present, higher energy costs due to datacenter builds, opportunity cost from harms to local infrastructure from haphazard builds, etc)? Should these firms indeed be runaway successes and immensely profitable to the point of paying off their investors and growing the larger economy, does this end up stifling innovation in a world where most new ideas are fed into LLMs for R&D that are then controlled by only a handful of companies and immensely wealthy people, via systems that are easily surveilled and stolen from without recourse?

So many, many questions yet to be answered. Betting the farm because of coding agents is one hell of a gamble.

I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit