Completely agree. Every SaaS tool will come with an MCP or an API to leverage composability. We can unlock useful functionalities from Claude Code and other aggregators (terminology from the post) to be able to compose different MCP's from different SaaS. One can imagine composing the results from a google search and using it in for a Figma design attempt, as a simple example.
This is an obvious direction that the industry is heading to. But what are the implications of this? I think the differentiating factor of having a good UI will reduce - productivity apps and SaaS will no longer have their aesthetic UI as a moat. I'm not sure whether this will tank their stocks or increase the valuation but what I'm sure of is that the productivity and usage will increase.
The combinatorial utility of different MCPs / APIs inside an agent is an interesting angle. Figma can technically plug into the same MCPs and use all the same models, but if the software design process doesn’t start in Figma anymore, it does not matter. The value will accrue to the point of integration (the agent).
Re: the value of good UI/UX
I think short-term, the value of good interfaces will actually increase - if anyone can easily build out the same product in 10 different ways, the best designed one that people actually want to use will likely be the choice. But that’s holding constant lots of things like distribution, type of SaaS, its place in the transaction stack, etc. So either guess would make a lot of assumptions.
It also appears (so far at least) that these models really struggle with front-end design. Something like /frontend-design skill is good but only gets you so far. It still requires a ton of steering to get it to a sensical place. So for now, whoever can steer it is still valuable. But I’m sure more and more of that will get codified and internalized by the model and the harness. So the design steering will become more and more abstract.
Long-term, we’re likely moving towards dynamically generated interfaces. Claude is already doing it with diagrams and charts in the chat. This opens up so many fascinating questions. What happens when UI doesn’t have to be one-size-fits-all, where each person may get their GUI generated with their preferences and context in mind? What happens to the design process when your UI doesn’t have to scale to a ton of user types and use cases? Will we even be designing UIs or something else entirely? Will Jakob’s Law still apply or will our individual GUIs diverge so much that I won’t be able to navigate your smartphone if I pick it up?
System design and interface design are the remaining hard parts of an application. To build the best interfaces you need to also understand system design. Smart teams that get these right will stand apart from the vibers.
First, mcp, like cli, like api, is a kind of (user facing) interface, just not graphical. It still needs to be designed, just by different people with differing skills.
Second, textual interface can only go so far in terms of information ingestion. Trying to describe a complex relationship between entities can be extremely difficult with text. However, a good graphical interface will make complex information easier to digest.
So in my opinion, the moat will emphasize organization which knows how to plan good a custom experience, whether graphical or textual, and less where tables and forms are the main business
Previously, a lot of SaaS’s valuation was dependent on it being a ‘platform’ where their customers ‘do almost everything only on their platform’, keeping them within that SaaS’s ecosystem.
By making the tools compostable, the valuation from this ‘keeping within’ angle will slowly disappear, but maybe it can be replaced by increase usage as a source of valuation.
I think that also explains why a bunch of companies are now all racing to build the same thing - the everything-in-one-place universal context store with their own agents on top of it. Linear, Notion, Salesforce, etc. Because the alternative is a much worse business to be in.
I noticed that too, but I wonder if what they are offering is just a proprietary formatting for context store, or is there something more operationally complex than that.
Whoever is able to act as the central store for all your context and be the integration point for all your agents running on top (including your proprietary ones) will have leverage in the ecosystem. Everyone else will be the supplier. The more context you have from different places (code, tickets, PRDs, markdown files, CRM, etc) and the deeper your agents plug into all of this, the harder it'll be to switch away to something else painlessly.
I mean, this was the web 2.0 dream. And then everyone realized that giving people an easy way out of your platform wasn't good for business. And all of the APIs dried up. Tremendously disappointing.
This is an obvious direction that the industry is heading to. But what are the implications of this? I think the differentiating factor of having a good UI will reduce - productivity apps and SaaS will no longer have their aesthetic UI as a moat. I'm not sure whether this will tank their stocks or increase the valuation but what I'm sure of is that the productivity and usage will increase.