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Start free trial →Y Combinator Startup Podcast · Startups & Venture · November 2026
Graham asked whether the shrinking agent harness makes it easier for competitors to catch Replit. Masad says yes, and describes the treadmill of constantly moving on to the next thing.
…you make it work? And the crazy thing, Paul, is that the harness circuit 24 is 10 times more complex than the harness today because the models were less capable. Yeah. So as models get more capable, like what the kind of the engineering you have to do to make them become agents is less and less so.
Does that mean it's easier for people to compete with you?
Yes. But we have to do, well, that's the thing about the AI business today is that you have to just accept that everything that you're doing is like getting commoditized constantly. And you have to like zoom in. Be doing
the next thing. Be
doing the next thing, right? But the other big thing that we demonstrated is that AI can provision infrastructure. So up until that point,
you actually have infrastructure to provision. Yes. That's the thing that's different between you and all these competitors, right?