Is Software Still a Moat for AI Agents?

David Pawlan says software is still a moat for AI agents. People talk as if software is no longer a moat, but the products still show a stark performance gap once they run at real scale.

Power users he surveyed hit two frustrations. Trust is a huge one. The other is getting blocked in the day-to-day: a task fails, and the person wonders why they are using AI when a browser would have worked. Some teams are innovating on commerce and browser use, including checkout against inventory, browsers built into the product, Hark showing the browser as it moves, and Kicker, a Chrome extension for browser use. Agents that can perform for hundreds of thousands of users stand apart from products that are only starting to scale, where performance degrades immediately. Founders there are dealing with outages and figuring out how to scale. The moat may be crossable in a year or so, but the difference is clear today.

Time spent on the infrastructure has shifted his attention to how the agents actually run and which tweaks each one makes. The open question is how the category grows on scalability while also fixing trust and the ability to finish a task.