JD Ross discusses the competitive threat that frontier AI foundation labs pose to vertical AI companies like Harvey in specialized domains like legal and accounting.
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Ross: Zero full-time engineers at Coverage write code manually anymore
“Not a single one of our full-time engineers right now writes code anymore. They do everything through Codex, Cloud Code, or Cursor.”
Insight
Ross: Market speculation creates real business value by attracting top talent
“I think the funny thing about America is that we love speculation and speculation actually creates real value. People think of speculation as this bad thing, but in the case, in this case, we sort of got really lucky in that there was this meme stock moment fo…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Ross: Mid-market SaaS will be worthless in five years due to AI
“I think it's a barbell thing. Like, the large AI companies are gonna eat the top end of value, and everyone in the middle is gonna just commoditize, or people who aren't even in the software business. Like, in the next two or three years, this isn't true, righ…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Ross: In five years, workers will one-shot custom software, making SaaS worthless
“If you take the five year view, kids who are in college today who come out and start working in a construction company or something are going to look at every problem they're paying for software and say, this doesn't do exactly what I need. And I can one shot …”
Insight
Ross: Most US homes are commodities accurately valued sight-unseen
“Most homes are not like pieces of art. Most homes in the country are not like your home. They're sort of commodity. They're closer to like a standard skew than a kind of one-off thing. And so you can value them sight unseen much more accurately than someone wh…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Ross: Zero WithCoverage engineers write code manually, relying completely on AI
“Not a single one of our full-time engineers right now, writes code anymore. They do everything through codex, cloud code, or cursor.”