Microsoft breaks free from OpenAI, using your harness to add drag instead of velocity, and the Linux built-ins you're sleeping on

**Ben Lloyd-Pearson** (0:05)
So, I don't know, Andrew, what do you think? Everyone's freaking out about the AI SaaS apocalypse. It seems to be ongoing. We're all wondering, are we gonna have a job next year or next six months from now? I don't know. What do you think, Andrew? Is it officially here? Like, is AI taking everyone's, you know, are we all just gonna vibe code SaaS from now on and just never buy anything again? I know there's a few tools I wanna do that too.

**Andrew Ziegler** (0:27)
Wow, immediately kicking us off from like the existential end of the discussion. I love it. So yeah, are you talking about all the talk of build versus buy and the AI SaaS apocalypse that's like a giant Godzilla stomping around through the city, it feels like, and it's like, is it gonna step on your office next? And, you know, I feel like we've got a lot of feedback too from our community. Everyone's kind of feeling this kind of pressure right now, especially in the middle of the year, as well as when people's product and finance cycles tend to be like in a major time of transition. People are planning for the rest of the year.
And I think this conversation is happening all across the place. You know, where are the places that you've been seeing us talk about this, Ben? Cause I know that folks have been coming back to us with feedback about how this is kind of being discussed in their own companies as well.

**Ben Lloyd-Pearson** (1:20)
Yeah, well, if you haven't seen it, we just published an article to Dev Interrupted Substack into our LinkedIn newsletter where we talk about the AI SaaS apocalypse and how we think it's a mirage. And we reached out to some people from our community. We did our own experiments of trying to use an agentic orchestrator to replicate core capabilities within the LinearB platform, something that we know extremely well. And then we got the insights from friends of the show, like Rob Zuber and Tachiana Mahmoud, and I think a few other people as well. Sorry if I'm forgetting who else might have contributed to that. As well as a lot of discussion that's been happening out on social media around this topic. And I think the TLDR of it is that it's never been easier to experiment and to learn about something new and to have an AI agent or just an AI chat that really helps you develop and challenge your ideas. That part of the DIY side of it is actually immensely valuable. But the reality is that the equation I feel like really hasn't changed.
If it's something that adds a core competency to your organization to build it yourself, that you need to deliver value to your customers, like that's the stuff you should be building. But if it's something that is just going to help you do your job better, there's usually domain experts out there that can build a much better product for that. So, yeah, there's a lot of hype, I think on both sides of the equation. I think I'm definitely falling into the equation that, yeah, maybe some types of companies or services are at risk of AI disruption. I mean, disruption is certainly happening, but the reality is that I don't see AI just building everything for us in the near term.
Maybe it's still a ways off, but in the near term, we still need experts to build software for us. Who would have thought?

**Andrew Ziegler** (3:14)
The great part about this is that the experts in our community made that article possible when we reached out to them and got their feedback on this prevailing topic right now for a lot of us SaaS leaders. And what you just said a moment ago, it really directly is aligned and rooted with what Rob Zuber, the CTO at CircleCI, said to us. He's a past guest on the show and he made his decisions anchored in, does it provide value to my customer? Does it double down on our specific domain expertise of what we bring to the market? And I think that's the critical pivot for any build versus buy discussion is understanding, is this intimately connected with the mechanics of me delivering value? Or is this something external supporting that operation? And then that discussion often becomes a lot easier to navigate as well.

**Ben Lloyd-Pearson** (4:05)
Yeah, well, welcome to the Friday Deploy brought to you by LinearB, the engineering productivity platform that helps you wrangle the agentic SDLC. I'm your host, Ben Lloyd-Pearson.

**Andrew Ziegler** (4:17)
And I'm your host, Andrew Ziegler.

**Ben Lloyd-Pearson** (4:19)