a lot of talk on how 1000 startups just died due to Claude managed agents. I think that’s overblown - the truth is the moat for agentic products has been shifting from infra engineering to domain expertise + data for a while, managed agents is GOOD news if you’re a domain expert turned founder Previously if you were say a CPA building an agent - you had to wrestle with a lot of infra complexity just to get things working. Sandboxes for execution, state / session management, error handling etc Now with Claude handling the plumbing, you can focus on domain specific value creation, for example - tax logic / insights from the 1000s of returns you’ve processed as proprietary data for your agents to pattern match against - tribal knowledge on tax optimization strategies, state-specific quirks, weird behaviors that increase audit risk etc - things that aren’t found in generalized LLMs today - domain specific integrations into quickbooks for accounting, plaid for banking, avalara for tax reconciliation etc At end of day, for startups building vertical AI agents for “X” - what you really want to be selling is not the agent scaffolding itself but the codified expertise of a top practitioner of “X” - the judgement and outcomes of an expert doctor, accountant, lawyer, etc, encoded into software
