The Software Moat Is Collapsing

Edition 152 | January 26, 2026

I tried agents once, they ruined me. Manual workflows just don’t hit anymore.

Welcome back to Building AI Agents, your biweekly guide to everything new in the field of agentic AI!

In today’s issue…

• Coding agents are breaking the traditional software moat

• eBay bans AI shopping agents

• Apple announced update to Siri

• A free crash course on Claude Code

• Clawdbot signals the rise of local-first agents

…and more

🔍 SPOTLIGHT

Coding agents are leveling the playing field, and we're already seeing the proof.

For decades, the ability to build software was a moat. If you couldn't code, you were locked out. You either learned to program, hired someone who could, or watched your ideas stay ideas. That barrier is collapsing faster than most people realize, and the data is starting to show it.

Two signals stand out. First, new iOS app releases surged 60% year-over-year in December after basically zero growth for three years. The inflection point aligns almost perfectly with the rise of agentic coding tools like Claude Code, Cursor, and Windsurf. Second, Stack Overflow questions have collapsed 78%—falling from 200,000 monthly questions at its peak to under 4,000 in December 2025, the same level as when the site launched in 2008.

For those unfamiliar, Stack Overflow has been the internet's go-to Q&A forum for developers since 2008. For nearly two decades, it was the place programmers went when they got stuck—paste your error message, hope someone answered, and pray your question didn't get downvoted into oblivion. The running joke was that every developer's job was really just copying code from Stack Overflow and praying it worked. That entire workflow is now being replaced by coding agents that answer questions instantly, in context, without the friction of forum etiquette.

These are two micro-trends pointing to the same macro shift: coding agents are democratizing who gets to build.

The old moat was code. The new moat is ideas.

Building software used to require either deep technical skills or tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars to hire someone who did. That cost & technical barrier kept most people away, no matter how good their ideas were. Now, more people are shipping production apps, people who have never written a line of code in their lives or coders that were not full stack are describing what they want to a coding agent and watching it build the thing. One CMO documented his journey from zero programming knowledge to four published apps, built entirely through Claude Code and what Andrej Karpathy has dubbed "vibe coding."

The economics have shifted dramatically. What once required a development team now requires an idea, a coding agent, and the willingness to iterate until the vision materializes. These agents code and also debug errors, refactor architecture, and ship entire features. They're not only making existing developers faster, they're redefining who gets to be a builder in the first place. Hint, Hint, Anyone.

We're barely one year into the era of capable coding agents, and the impacts are already very measurable. App submissions are surging. Legacy developer infrastructure is changing. The barrier that separated "people with ideas" from "people who can build" is eroding.

The only differentiator is the people using the tools and those that are not.

Keep learning and building!

—AP