It's just February 7 and Agents Are Eating Software Faster Than Any of Us Thought
Feb 07, 2026
The agents are coming for you narrative went from whisper to scream this week. While still so early, Wall Street’s lemming-like narrative spooked the market. Here’s why - most of it was Anthropic’s plugin framework which I highlighted in last week’s newsletter.
Seems like Wall Street caught on to that a few days later along with the journalists. IMO everyone overreacted although in the long term, the trend is accelerating faster than any of us thought.
As I wrote last March: “Software is eating the world. AI is eating software. But that’s just cannibalizing existing spend. If AI/Agents can eat into labor, then opportunity for apps get much bigger. If not, we are in for a world of hurt as many apps can get easily cloned.” That take rings truer than ever.
The models and harnessing to deliver AI are improving faster than any of us ever thought possible from the model providers like Anthropic and OpenAI dropping new models on the same day along with innovation from an unfunded open source builder at OpenClaw
Diffusion of agentic workflows is happening faster than ever in the enterprise - it’s all accelerating
This doesn’t mean SaaS is dead and it doesn’t mean every SaaS co should be down 15% in one day, but it does mean that these companies better start cannibalizing themselves yesterday in order to exist tomorrow. Some will make it, maybe 20-25%, the rest won’t as it’s super hard to turn a battleship around and think in first principles and set up several startups within a large org.
Brad Gerstner from Altimeter Capital nails it - all about the unpredictability of future free cash flow. The only companies who escape the meltdown are those companies that can show they can accelerate their revenue because of AI. Application software is in the “too hard” to predict bucket. Clickhouse, Databricks and others, easier to see.
Anyone who has used Claude Code and Cowork should know that tech always starts with early adopters, usually technical engineer types, and spreads from there. It doesn’t take a huge leap of faith to see that what Claude Code did for engineering would eventually move to other business areas - it was just a matter of time.
If that wasn’t enough, Anthropic released Opus 4.6 and more harnessing to manage and orchestrate swarms of agents.
The crazy aspect is that it can also orchestrate humans 🤯.
As mentioned earlier, it’s technology like this that is pushing into the Fortune 500 much faster than any of us ever thought possible. Here’s Goldman Sachs announcing that it will automate the back office which is huge, especially since it is a regulated entity.
This data is pre-agent swarms. Now imagine hundreds of agents coordinating simultaneously. That 20% will be more like 40%+ by the end of the year.
Speaking with many VCs and founders after spending the past week in San Francisco, I can tell you that this is one of the most exciting and scariest times to be in technology. I, for one, feel this dichotomy in every single conversation.
All I know is that it’s just February 7, and I have no idea what the rest of the year will look like.
But if you're a founder, this is the golden window. Incumbents are deer in headlights, platforms are handing you weapons for free, and the entire enterprise stack is up for grabs. The founders who move now will own the next decade
TL:DR version: 1. AI as the worker, not just the tool
Several of the RFS categories (AI-native hedge funds, AI-native agencies, AI guidance for physical work) share a common thread: YC wants startups where AI does the work end-to-end rather than just assisting a human. An AI agency doesn’t sell software to designers; it is the design firm. An AI hedge fund doesn’t add a chatbot to an existing trading desk; it’s built from day one around agents that research, strategize, and execute. This signals YC believes we’re past the “copilot” era and into the “AI-as-the-entire-workforce” era.
2. AI moves upstream from code to decisions
“Cursor for Product Managers” and the expanded AI developer tools category reveal a pattern: the bottleneck in software is shifting from writing code to deciding what to build and maintaining what you’ve built. YC sees the code-generation wave as maturing and is now looking at the layers above it (product strategy, customer insight synthesis) and below it (debugging, testing, deployment). The implication is that founders should look for where human judgment is still the bottleneck in a workflow, because that’s where the next wave of AI companies will be built.
3. Stablecoins + regulation = a fintech window opening right now
The stablecoin financial services category, combined with YC’s own decision to offer funding in USDC, is a strong signal. With the GENIUS and CLARITY Acts creating a new regulatory framework, YC sees a narrow window for startups to build compliant crypto-native financial infrastructure (yield accounts, cross-border payments, etc.) before incumbents catch up. It’s notable that YC is putting its own money where its mouth is by actually paying founders in stablecoins.
Enterprise Tech
#amazing how fast the tides can turn; Cursor was all the rage just a few months ago and then Claude Code changed everything, no IDE needed, just type in Claude Code and let it work. It was the talk of SF this past week so no surprise here - now Claude Code can manage swarms of agents and humans too
#must read from Greg Brockman - how OpenAI is transitioning to full agentic, retooling and cultural shifts:
As a first step, by March 31st, we’re aiming that:
(1) For any technical task, the tool of first resort for humans is interacting with an agent rather than using an editor or terminal.
(2) The default way humans utilize agents is explicitly evaluated as safe, but also productive enough that most workflows do not need additional permissions.
In order to get there, here’s what we recommended to the team a few weeks ago:
#the beauty of open source - nicely done by Runlayer although I’ll be spending some time this weekend trying to keep up with the 5 new releases of OpenClaw on Digital Ocean
