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The incumbents (with distribution) are starting to fully embrace vibe coding. And startups that historically relied on quickness and smarts are NOT ready for what’s coming at them. A significant rethink in startup playbooks is in order.
Nine days ago, I published an essay arguing Claude Code needed a “Windows moment” - a GUI for non-developers. Basically, I called for someone to own the Desktop app opportunity for wrapping around Claude Code.
Speak of the devil.
Yesterday, Anthropic shipped Cowork, a macOS Desktop app that wraps Claude Code in a GUI. What’s notable: the app was fully vibe coded (not a single line of hand-written code), built in 10 days according to Claude Code creator Boris Cherny’s tweet.
Yes, the product (only available to Max plans) has rough edges, and isn’t exactly the vision that I laid out. But the significance shouldn’t be lost. A $350bn company with the biggest developer-facing distribution (after Microsoft) just shipped a vibe coded app to production, almost as fast as I could write a Substack piece.
Now, things get complicated when incumbents embrace the “vibeMaxx” movement, out of the fear that they, too, might get disrupted if they don’t ship faster. Most obviously, scaling startups will get harder.
Unfortunately, it’s already happening. Incumbent SaaS feature velocity is skyrocketing:
Salesforce pivoted AgentForce in 6 months after getting panned, and they just launched an Anthropic-backed Slackbot in 3 months since announcement.
Hubspot released a V1 of their AI agent for growth in a quarter.
Note, these datapoints are from BEFORE the recent agentic AI step-up with Claude Code v2 in December 2025.
Things are only accelerating. The incumbents are working harder, cultures are shifting to embrace YOLO, and it’s only a matter of time before nimbleness, incentives, and informational asymmetry—which used to favor startups—evaporate thanks to agentic coding. Not that it will save the incumbents (CRM down 7% today even after releasing Agents for Slack) - they will, however, swim a lot faster.
But, here’s the uncomfortable truth: vibe coding was supposed to level the playing field. Instead, it’s poised to amplify existing distribution advantages. When incumbents move at startup speed, they absorb 1→N innovation faster than startups can reach market. Funnily enough, I said the exact same thing 18 months ago in “Why Innovation’s Dilemma Doesn’t Apply to AI”.
Of course, as Anthropic trailblazes the agentic AI category, there may be greater output from startups building different variations of Claude Cowork, as TAM increases. That argument, however, drastically underestimates how “captureable” TAM shrinks for a single given startup (point estimate). There are multiple historical precedents of this, which I’ll get into.
But here’s the kicker. The takeaway isn’t “Distribution is the New Moat” (another popular LinkedIn thought-slop I debunked last year). Rather, distribution is just the price of a lottery ticket, not the lottery itself.
That said, not all hope is lost. So in this essay, I’ll offer thoughts on how to re-calibrate against the new reality and discuss the industry-wide implications. And you must do that now, before spending a year competing in a hopeless market, only to be disrupted by the next Claude release and you are stuck running a business you hate.
What Just Happened
But first, let’s catch up on the Claude Cowork news.
In my Claude Code is MS-DOS piece, I said Claude Code needed a GUI—something that preserved its file system power but worked for non-developers.
Claude Cowork is just that. You can drop any folder inside your desktop, and ask it to do some work (e.g. create a PRD), and it does it.
But it does something even smarter than Claude Code. It seems able to generate and leverage Skills on the fly to accomplish tasks. For example, I gave it a prompt to generate a PDF, and it dynamically pulled a PDF processing Skill to assist itself.
Signs of continual learning, if you ask me.
Clearly, it’s not far from a world where Claude Cowork actively distills user preferences into Skills, such that end users don’t have to think about these low-level constructs.
But the real significance is in how quickly the Claude Code team put this together. Yes, you may be skeptical about their claims of 100% vibe coding it. But having vibe coded large apps myself, I think they can be trusted.
The product details matter less than the timeline. 1.5 weeks. That’s the new normal for what a well-resourced team with vibe coding can ship.
Now, let’s talk strategy and implications.
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