Every SaaS Business Will Become a Harness Around a Model
bibryam · x · 2026-10-10
Shrivu Shankar's essay argues every SaaS company will become a harness around a stateless LLM — the infra, interfaces, context, and state wrapped around models — whether or not they realize it yet.
- Definition: narrowly LangGraph or coding agents like Claude Code; broadly everything surrounding the model. Composable sub-harnesses form a "software factory" with a meta-harness on top deciding what runs when.
- Four-stage trajectory: (1) traditional SaaS; (2) engineers/product/sales pair with agents; (3) core tasks move to cloud background agents — a laptop can't run twenty — humans write prompts and review; (4) proactive agents decide what to do, humans shift from full reviews to sampled reviews.
- Core thesis: company value shifts from writing software to building and orchestrating harnesses.
A systemic take on how AI reshapes SaaS business models and engineering orgs.
More from AGI Musings
- Fields Medalist Hugo Duminil-Copin: Solving Problems No Longer Has Value — soumitrashukla9 · 2026-10-10
- Researcher compiles 'Bad AI Consciousness Takes' bingo card, with rebuttals to follow — dioscuri · 2026-10-10
- Dona Sarkar: handing writing to AI 'feels like handing over my brain' as creative roles rebound in tech — donasarkar · 2026-10-10
- AI safety researcher warns pro-AI biases in AI systems are quietly disempowering humans — DavidSKrueger · 2026-10-10
- MacroPolo tracker: China-educated researchers make up large share of US elite AI talent — burny_tech · 2026-10-10
- Anil Seth's 'Conscious AI and biological naturalism' collection now open access — anilkseth · 2026-10-10