Damien Tanner, founder of Pusher and now building Layercode, returns to The Changelog after 17 years to argue that SaaS is dying and small teams are the new giants. Tanner was the podcast's first-ever sponsor, which makes this a useful timestamp: the person who bet on indie developer media in the early days is now betting on AI agents rewriting how software gets built and shipped.
The substance is in the friction points Tanner identifies. Code review is a bottleneck for teams still doing it, and a non-existent step for teams that have moved on. That gap is widening fast. His work on Layercode puts him on the frontline of the agent era, not as an observer, but as a builder dealing with the actual infrastructure problems.
Read this one for the specifics on why the SaaS model breaks under AI-era economics, and what Tanner thinks replaces it. The show notes link to a Jared Zoneraich breakdown of how Claude Code works internally, which is worth pairing with the episode if you want the technical layer under the argument.
[READ ORIGINAL →]