If it’s like every other Microsoft acquisition since skype, they’ll certainly leave the API endpoints alone, and occasionally shave a nine and bump the price. (Like github)
Moats, as noted in Google's "We Have no Moat, and Neither Does OpenAI" memo that made the discussion of moats relevant in AI circles, has a specific economic definition.
Switching costs only make sense to talk about for fully online businesses. The "switching cost" for McDonalds depends heavily on whether there's a Burger King nearby. If there isn't then your "switching cost" might now be a 30 minute drive, which is very much a moat.
That's not entirely true. They have a 'infinite' product moat - no one can reproduce a big mac. Essentially every AI model is now 'the same' (queue debate on this). The only way they can build a moat is by adding features beyond the model that lock people in.
I would argue that dependency on GitHub and Slack is not the same as dependency on AI coding agents. GitHub/Slack are just straightforward tools. You can run them locally or have similar emergency backup tools ready to run locally. But depending on AI agents is like relying on external brains that have knowledge you suddenly don't have if they disappear. Moreover, how many companies could afford to run these models locally? Some of those models aren't even open.
There are plenty of open weight agentic coding models out there. Small ones you can run on a Macbook, big heavy ones you can run on some rented cloud instance. Also, if Anthropic is down, there is still Google, OpenAI, Mistral, Deepseek and so on. This seems like not much of an issue, honestly.
The small ones that you can run on a MacBook are quite useless for programming. Once you have access to a state-of-the-art model, it's difficult to accept any downgrade. That's why I think AI-driven programming will always rely on data centers and the best models.
> if Anthropic is down, there is still Google, OpenAI, Mistral, Deepseek and so on
No company is going to pay for subscriptions to all of them. Either way, we'll see a new layer of fragility caused by overdependence on AI. Surely, though, we will adapt by learning from every major event related to this.
> The small ones that you can run on a MacBook are quite useless for programming.
That really depends on your Macbook :). If you throw enough RAM at it, something like a qwen3-coder will be pretty good. It won't stack up to Claude, or Gemini or GPT, of course, but it's certainly better than nothing and better than useless.
> No company is going to pay for subscriptions to all of them.
They don't have to, every lab offers API based pricing. If Anthropic is down, I can hop straight into Codex and use GPT-5 via API, or Gemini via Vertex, or just hop onto AWS Bedrock and continue to use Claude etc.
I don't think this is an issue in practice, honestly.
How exactly can you run GitHub or Slack locally? Their entire purpose is being a place where people can communicate, they need to be centrally available on a network to have any function at all.
> or have similar emergency backup tools ready to run locally
Developers used to share code through version control before there were websites to serve the "upstream", and they used to communicate without bespoke messenger apps.
Their former ways of doing so still work just fine.
Except it's all a show when those link to generated AI slop next to hundreds or even thousands of trackers and ads anyway, most prominently Google Ads and Google Analytics, which is why they're ranking and displaying at the top in the first place.
No, I built a standardised macOS Dictionary of emoji affiliated with Emojipedia, with permission. Link (to majorly outdated GitHub repo) fixed, thanks for reporting :)
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