Claude Cowork is great when you want to collaborate with AI and third-party tools via MCP, but it's not a multi-user collaboration tool built for organizations. Our customers need to collaborate on software products and AI is only one part of the equation. Our customers need a system of record (long-term history, priority, and cross-team visibility of a project) and contextual collaboration (e.g. a customer success team member reporting a feature request or bug, a person on the product team deciding it's worth building/fixing). Claude Code is excellent for individual developer velocity (we use it a ton), but Linear’s agent is integrated into the workflow where the planning actually happens and is multi-player by design.
> but Linear’s agent is integrated into the workflow where the planning actually happens and is multi-player by design.
I wish you succeed and become multi-trillion dollar company but this is dying a slow death. I work on multiple projects as a contractor and number of things these days that are "multiple-player" are slowly approaching a zero...
> One of the things that AI has afforded, is that the lowest-tier, bottom-feeding scammer, can now look every bit as polished and professional as a Fortune 50 company (often, even more).
Your arguments are totally valid, niche tools will be alive and well. I think my take is that even in niche tools we will see a lot of generalization and more flexible niche tools will eventually win.
The problem is that software can be too flexible. A great example is companies ending up using Excel as a load-bearing database, relying on a bunch of incomprehensible macros to execute critical business logic.
Sure, it's flexible, but are they really better off than a competitor using properly-engineered one-off software? In the end, is there really a difference between software development and flexible-tool-configuration?
Absolutely. When we started growing (I was employee #3, we were about 20 people when I left), we didn't use our own product for our own needs. It wasn't designed for a tiny startup, it would be like building a sand castle with a bulldozer.
But we started as a "boutique" company that implemented everything requested by our then small number of clients (mainly out of desperation, we were self-funded and we didn't have much leeway, we needed those clients). It was as flexible as it gets before the LLM times.
But after a while, you start noticing patterns, an understanding of what works and what doesn't in a given context. Our later customers rarely requested a feature that we didn't already have or we didn't have a better alternative of. It's not like we had a one-size-fits-all solution that we forced on everyone. We offered a few alternative ways of working that fit different contexts (hiring an airline pilot is a very different context than hiring a flight attendant). And in time, this know-how started to become our most important value proposition.
At some point we even started joking about leaving the software business and offering recruitment consulting services instead.
In fewer words: It was already a fairly flexible and customizable tool. But then came a time when a client requested faster horses we could show them our car instead and they recognized the value. (And occasionally, when _they_ requested a car instead of our faster horses, _we_ recognized the value and implemented it).
This is not what the article is about. Main idea is that rigid software can finally be replaced by flexible, since flexibility is no longer such expensive
Where do you draw the line? If going from forming sentences to achieving medal level success on IMO questions, doing extensive web research on its own and writing entire SaaS apps based on a prompt in under 10 years is just "evolutionary", then it's one heck of an evolution.
It's always been the case that people in to tech see a smooth slope rather than some sort of discontinuity, like you might perceive if you stepped back a bit. That's why you can go laugh at "thing makes a billion dollars even though nerds say it's obvious and incremental" type posts going back 25 years. iPhone is a great one.
This is a pretty small update, no? Nothing major since R1, everyone else is just catching up to that, and putting small spins on it, Anthropic's is "hybrid" research instead of separate models
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