Spent two days at the AI Agents Conference in NYC. Most of the companies there were betting on the wrong moat.

One speaker (a VC) said his number for evaluating AI-native startups is ARR per engineer, and that the number ought to be going up. Almost every talk and every booth at the AI Agents Conference was selling a fix for something that broke this year when agents hit production. Observability, governance, supervisor agents, data substrates, "someone's gotta babysit the bots." But what's actually still going to be around in a couple years? What's defensible and durable? The old SaaS pitch was simple. We bundle the expensive engineering investments and domain expertise into a tool.