I think this conflates setup cost with operating cost. The painful part of self-hosting was always to get it working: writing configs, reading docs, SSH ceremony. That's exactly the part that agents can help with a lot, so the perceived gap to Vercel shrinks a lot. But the problems that come later are still there, you just discover it later. DDoS absorption, zero-downtime rollbacks, cert rotations failing at 3am, someone else getting paged when they do. An agent can write my firewall rules, but it doesn't carry a pager.

So I'd reframe the thesis a bit: AI didn't destroy the moat, it moved it. Saving the customer setup time is no longer worth paying for, taking operational liability for the customer still is. SaaS that only offer the former are indeed in trouble, and honestly founders should verify that their product doesn't have this issue.

Reducing friction and commoditizing make this an economic argument.

> I would have never switched before agents, barring some extreme necessity, but now an agent writes for us the Dockerfile, the build config, the deploy file, all of it, from one prompt.

Really? That's too hard for the author without an LLM agent?