How AI is breaking the SaaS business model...

The last few weeks have been concerning if you're a software developer and very concerning if you're a software mega corporation that relies on the SAS business model. The model where your customer never really owns your React app, but instead rents the privilege to click buttons forever at an 80% profit margin. Adobe, Salesforce, Service Now, Shopify, and many other companies collectively saw $1 trillion wiped off their market cap over the past few weeks. But the big question is why? You probably already know the answer. It's not interest rates or accounting fraud. It's AI. The suits just realized that if an AI agent can swap out the work of 10 people in 10 milliseconds, they don't need to buy 10 seats. They need zero. In today's video, we'll look at seven recent developments in the AI space that support the thesis that software as a service is headed towards a death spiral. It is February 17th, 2026, and you're watching the code report. Last week, OpenAI released the Codeex app for Mac OS, which they describe as a command center for agents. The app itself had over 1 million downloads in its first week, and it provides a simple way to handle agentic workflows in parallel that anyone can use. And what makes that so scary is that it means your boss no longer needs to ask you, the developer, to build an app, but instead can build the app himself and then just ask you to debug the 10,000 lines of code it generated. But behind OpenAI's Codeex app is the second thing you need to know about, the Codeex 5.3 model. Not only is it their most advanced coding model yet that crushes the Trust Me Bro benchmarks, but it's also 25% faster than previous versions, and it's also able to integrate skills now that allow to do things like image generation, writing, and research to handle the full girth of responsibilities by a product development team. That's impressive. But OpenAI's biggest rival in the coding space is Claude, which just released Opus 4.6. 6. Not only is it excellent at generating code, but now Enthropic is trying to break into other areas like legal analysis, financial modeling, and a bunch of other things that they'll use to justify expensive enterprise subscriptions. But the big Silicon Valley closed models are not the only thing making progress. Alibaba just released Quen 3 Coder Next, which is an openweight, highly capable coding model that gives companies the ability to host their own serious developer brain behind a firewall. And that kills another SAS advantage, vendor lockin, because why rent five different dev tools at $49 per month when you can self-host your own brain that rebuilds them all from scratch for free. That's a no-brainer. But another big release comes from ZAI with GLM5. It's a model that targets complex systems engineering and long horizon agentic jobs, and its performance approaches and sometimes beats the best closed models in the industry. But it's not the only open model challenger. Miniax M2.5 has been going viral the last couple days because it also manages intelligence on par with Frontier models at a fraction of the compute price. We're getting very close to the point of making these $200 AI plans obsolete because models like M2.5 are making top tier reasoning feel cheap, portable, and increasingly open to anyone with a decent GPU instead of a corporate expense account. It's pretty clear that none of these AI companies have much of a moat and the real battle being fought right now is who can build the best platform for autonomous code orchestration. And Microsoft wants to be the company that wins that battle with their GitHub agent HQ. A GitHub was originally designed just for code hosting, but now it's a complete AI agent orchestration platform. Agents can open issues, generate branches, and merge code when tests pass. Its project management, QA, and DevOps automation all rolled into one. But what about Google? They've been relatively quiet with Gemini releases lately. However, Whimo, their self-driving car company, just released the Whimo world model, which is all about simulation and prediction at scale. It demonstrates how AI systems can model complex environments, make decisions, and act autonomously. But the thing is, when you translate that into business software like forecasting, logistics, risk modeling, and operations, it starts to make a lot of traditional SAS dashboards that visualize these things look obsolete. And with that, we've looked at seven new developments in AI with one theme. When intelligence becomes abundant, software stops charging per human. And when the seat dies, so does the SAS profit margin. But even if SAS dies, there will be new opportunities for developers who know how to use modern tools like Oz by Warp, the sponsor of today's video. Warp already brought you a modern terminal, and they just launched Oz, a cloud platform for coding agents. is so instead of being stuck with one agent on your local machine, Oz lets you run hundreds of them in the cloud where they can make changes across multiple repos simultaneously. That means you could have one agent fixing a bug from Linear, another one updating docs from a pull request, and a third one scanning logs from a Graphana alert, all running at the same time. You can quickly launch new agents from the Oz web app or CLI, or set them up on schedules and event triggers. But once they're live, you can watch them work and steer things as needed. Try running your own agent today at the link below and use the code fireship for a special discount. This has been the code report. Thanks for watching and I will see you in the next one.

Run hundreds of coding agents in the cloud - https://oz.dev/fireship. Use code FIRESHIP to get one month of their Build plan for $5 (instead of $20). SaaS companies are getting crushed right now. Let's look at 7 new AI updates from the past few weeks that help explain why... Want more Fireship? 🗞️ Newsletter: https://bytes.dev 🧠 Courses: https://fireship.dev