Damien Tanner, founder of Pusher and now building Layercode, returned to The Changelog after 17 years to make a direct argument: SaaS is dying, code review is a bottleneck or already gone at many shops, and small teams can now build at a scale that previously required hundreds of engineers.
The conversation is worth reading in full not for the conclusion but for the specifics. Tanner was the podcast's first-ever sponsor, which gives this reunion an unusual continuity. He is building from the frontlines of the AI agent era, not theorizing from the outside, and his framing of the 'Small Giant' is grounded in what Layercode is actually doing today.
What comes next is the structural question his argument raises: if code review is already non-existent at some teams and SaaS margins are collapsing, who captures the value that small giants create. Tanner does not fully answer that. That gap is reason enough to listen.
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