Damien Tanner, founder of Pusher and now building Layercode, returned to The Changelog after 17 years to argue that SaaS is dying and that AI agents are the reason why. Tanner was the podcast's first-ever sponsor, which makes his reappearance a useful timestamp: the same person who bet on real-time web infrastructure in 2008 is now building infrastructure for the agent era.
The core claim is structural, not speculative. Small teams can now build and operate software at a scale that previously required large engineering organizations. Code review is either a bottleneck slowing teams down or, in some shops, already gone entirely. Tanner is building from the frontline, not theorizing from the sidelines, which is what makes his framing of the 'small giant' worth interrogating closely.
The full episode is worth reading for the specifics: how Layercode works, what Tanner means when he says SaaS is dying, and where the bottlenecks actually move when you remove the human from the review loop. The reference to Jared Zoneraich's breakdown of how Claude Code works is also worth following as a companion piece.
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