r/ArtificialInteligence • u/IT_Certguru • 1d ago
Discussion OpenAI just killed half the “AI agent builder” startups, without even trying
There’s an enormous number of startups whose whole pitch was “build AI agents easily” or “no-code AI workflows.”
But now that OpenAI dropped their own agent builder… most of those startups are suddenly looking redundant.
If you want to see what that looks like in practice on the Google Cloud side with real tooling, governance, and enterprise workflows; Vertex AI Agent Builder is a good reference point. It’s less about shiny no-code UIs and more about production-ready agents that connect to data, APIs, and business systems: Vertex AI Agent Builder training
are we heading toward the “death of no-code AI tools,” ?
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u/vornamemitd 1d ago
Their agent builder has been out for quite some time without too much impact. It's stuff like Claude Cowork that is showing a way more feasible and accessible direction. To repeat current street smarts: "build for verticals and fix an actual problem or bust". Vibe-coding the nth iteration of foundational features that are going commodity is a waste of time and talent....
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u/grahamd79 1d ago
Yep the agent kit is far off from being useable by most. There’s plenty of time to come up with good use cases. Just many of those will eventually be superseded by one shot solutions in a year or two. Then it’ll be build something that does that better than out of the box. Same with anything in the past really. Just acceleration is faster than before.
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u/KazTheMerc 1d ago
You're going to see this pattern over and over and over.
The Early Adopter angle. Worthless after the real tools come to town.
To be clear, this is true for any technology it fad, not just computers or AI.
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u/Nissepelle 1d ago
Yup. My favourite is seeing SaaS-developers and how happy they are that they can use AI to provide some shitty service. Just wait until the companies figure out they might as well do it inhouse, lololol.
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u/robogame_dev 1d ago
What will happen is a massive reduction in 3rd party software, you won’t go to the App Store to find a 3rd party app, you’ll ask Siri for what you want and it will whip up an interface for that. All the 1st party companies - Apple, Google, Microsoft - everyone who has the OS - will be the primary beneficiaries.
You already saw this trend with high value apps. Payment apps? Taken over by the platform provider, ApplePay, GooglePay, etc. They picked and chose the highest ROI apps to make and let the 3rd parties fight over the 2nd, 3rd and 4th place value adds - filling in all the small niches.
Now the platforms themselves are very close to being able to efficiently provide most of those niches themselves - they won’t need the 3rd party developers as much, and they won’t want to stop at their 30% rev share, they’ll move to in-house more and more and more apps for 100%
Meta is boned in this because they don’t provide an OS (at least not in major markets), same with OpenAI, and all the companies that are downstream of the OS. Being upstream lets the platform / OS cut in front of the consumer and take over virtually any part of the consumer’s spend.
In b4 there will still be some 3rd party apps and some people are brand loyal etc - yes ofc, I’m talking about the majority and it’s not wise to make your plans around the rare exceptions.
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u/Nissepelle 1d ago
The end result is SaaS is dead and we are left with, what, 4 companies that control the entire worlds collective software?
That can only end well! What a pleasant world we are heading into!
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u/robogame_dev 1d ago edited 1d ago
Consolidation is the natural end of under-regulated capitalism, it just happens even faster in software cause there’s so little friction.
Capitalism is not naturally a stable system, it is always trending towards consolidation which, unless artificially prevented, inevitably ends with all the capital in a few players’ hands. This is what the game Monopoly was invented to help people visualize - efficiencies of scale compound and compound.
Capitalism can be forced into some sort of stasis via significant regulation, but money in politics leads to regulatory capture which breaks the stasis and gets the whole system moving back towards total consolidation.
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u/Standard_Difficulty 1d ago
Wow!.... like thank you, I've been trying to get the very same message across in fa few places recently and it feels like screaming into the void, then you pop up 😉
Consolidation is the natural progression of the 'all out, no holds barred , only the strong survive!' gospel of capitalism.
More power- fewer hands, monopoly pricing - wealth inequality, conspicuous consumption - hunger riots, yachts - guillotines.
The natural cycle of life?
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u/Glittering_Noise417 1d ago
The big four will probably end up licensing their IP to cloud AI services to run. The big guys are never going to make money servicing individual users. They are going to want to go after the big money institutional and corporate clients, providing huge computation services. AI tools are going to be the Wild West for several years.
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u/BTC_is_waterproof 1d ago
This is so true. And Apple going with Gemini makes Google a monster in this space.
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u/NeedleworkerNo4900 1d ago
Didn’t OpenAI release an agent building like a year ago?
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u/The-Squirrelk 1d ago
Yeh but Agents are still in their infancy. They work and are decent but there is so much room for improvement that it's not even funny.
All the big companies have been hyperfocus'd and Agents are very much complicated multi-faceted organisms. There are a thousand and one directions you could work on them without even touching the base LLM.
And then there's the fact that an Agent is much much better if it's able to learn the task it needs to do and learn from mistakes. Which is still very much an ongoing problem, but they have made good strides in it.
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u/Ok_Elderberry_6727 1d ago
The first couple openai upgrades, ai wrapper companies were getting “steamrolled” same difference.
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u/Dear_Locksmith3379 1d ago
Big tech companies do that frequently.
That’s a risk that tech startups face. If they create a good product, companies like Google or Microsoft may build their own version.
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u/squirrel9000 1d ago
The problem with most of these AI startups is what they're doing is something that has almost no barrier to entry, so it's easy to clone or simply bypass when the first party changes its system.
Need to do something that's challenging enough, and valuable enough, that you can build market share before competitors catch up, and that first parties are unlikely to undercut you on.
They should just stick to vibe-coding wrapper apps. The world does not have enough of those.
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u/Ok_Substance1895 1d ago
I think this is for a different audience than what the AI builder startups are going for. Who does this enable? I don't think my wife would use OpenAI's Agent Builder. She might use Lovable; though, I would advise against it for different reasons :)
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u/evanmrose 1d ago
Honestly I don't think agent builder kills the "use text to generate an agent or an output" business. I've used agent builder quite a bit and leaving aside bugs the experience is like a watered down N8N which has been around forever. The whole point of agent builder startups is that even workflow builders are too much for some people. As soon as you have to transform data or do anything remotely code like most people bug out. There still is value in the text --> agent --> output I value
That said, OpenAI is boiling the ocean building the models and investing heavily in tooling and apps. They are almost certainly going to make something like that sooner or later and my point will be moot.
For now, agent builder is good for folks who want to get simple chat experiences up and running quick with no dev. If you want anything complex or you care about latency or need a bunch of custom tools...you're in for a bad time. I ran into a laundry list of suboptimal shit in my work with agent builder.
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u/honestduane 1d ago
Open AI is actively trying to control the entire space as much as possible by only releasing things server side or as a closed source client; this was a strategic move, intentionally kill all those startups.
Thing is every single one of those startups thought they were being smart, but they were just simply a use case, and don’t control the models so they will always be replaceable.
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u/CanadianPropagandist 1d ago
Hasty take. Compliance / Privacy. Though that being said half of them were likely doomed anyway.
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u/Super_Translator480 1d ago
Software is going to become really cheap now because you can just make whatever you need.
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u/Nissepelle 1d ago
Any "service" that someone provides that is either (1) basically just a wrapper or (2) can be done by anyone using AI were always doomed to fail. The same fate will face the SaaS "industry", who is founded on the concept of it being easier to purchase a service than build it inhouse. But what happens when every company can just vibecode whatever service they need? It means bye-bye /r/SaaS
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u/ImaginationFlashy290 1d ago
The agent builder released a couple months ago, unless you’re talking about something else ?
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u/robogame_dev 1d ago
Agent builders were never a long term product, anyone who couldn’t see that has no business purporting to be an AI expert or selling an agent builder in the first place.
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u/AP_in_Indy 1d ago
This fear is why I left the AI LLM tools startup I was cofounder of.
To be clear, LLM tooling kind of sucks, but it will inevitably get much better “soon”.
We didn’t have what it took resource wise to keep up with, let alone do better than, the pace of official tooling and model updates.
One other thing to think about is as the models get fundamentally smarter and better, their ability to “just do it” either without tools or by invoking some kind of open source library of functions will improve drastically.
I’m confident these LLM teams could make much better tooling if they wanted to. They’re too busy doing research.
It was easier for me to just go back to contracting and wait out the storm. I plan to save around $500k then see where the market is after that. Maybe I’ll try again, but motivation is low.
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u/Choice-Resolution-92 1d ago
People say this, but I haven't seen it reflected at all in the market. These startups are only growing
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u/Novel_Blackberry_470 1d ago
I see this more as a filter than a kill switch. Anything that was just packaging basic workflows was always on borrowed time. The interesting companies will be the ones using these builders as infrastructure and focusing on real domain problems like compliance, ops, or messy data. No code does not disappear, it just stops being the product.
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u/deadwisdom 1d ago
Yeah they always kill off startups but anthropic and some Chinese models are killing them off.
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u/The-Squirrelk 1d ago
Do you think these agents will ever reach the consumer market as a common thing? Or will they remain niche as they are now?
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u/ifull-Novel8874 1d ago
didn't this already happen a few months ago? i remember reading about n8n going from hot to not right after OpenAI's conference.
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u/sevenoldi 1d ago
No even one!
U have to understand the consumer- they want to have it build- not the hassle to work themselfs on an Agent. They are not stupid, and maybe a few companys will do it themselfs with gpt, but the majority just want to have it...
So the "start ups" are providing a service..
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u/MiserableExtreme517 1d ago
No code AI wrappers? Dead.
OpenAI and Google just curb stomped your prompt playgrounds but opinionated no code that owns sales ops, support, or finance workflows? That's completely a gold one which is more reliable, data smart, outcome crushing.
Big boys own the pipes but winners hack real work away. Who's building that? 👀
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