Agents Are the New Power Users

Jason Lemkin is an investor and the founder of SaaStr, a community for B2B software builders. This week he wrote an article, Your Agents Are About to Start Firing Your Vendors. Ours Fired Marketo., that hits something I've been thinking about.

SaaStr's agents "fired" Marketo, a platform that Jason used for 10 years. The decision was driven by an agent that hit API rate limits, surfaced the failure, recommended alternatives, and migrated to a new platform. SaaStr's agentic needs became the determining factor in a vendor decision.

That's lived experience for our startup, and I'm sure for a growing army of others. Earlier this year, we used Trello through their website and mobile app to manage our development work… manually dragging cards around a Kanban board to prioritize the engineering roadmap. It worked fine for human-operated project management. Then we integrated Linear into our engineering workflow, and agents became the primary, direct operators of the engineering planner.

The difference wasn't minor. It was categorical. We moved our interaction to agents operating through Linear's CLI and MCP, and the volume of tracked work increased by 50x. What was a Kanban board became a full-blown engineering context ledger... issues, branches, and deployments, all connected programmatically. The agents didn't need a visual interface. They needed clean, well-scoped, programmatic access to create issues, update status, link to commits, and close work items. Linear gave them that in a way Trello didn't. The decision made itself.

A similar calculus is showing up across many levels in our stack… GitHub, Vercel, Sentry, and Supabase. They're great tools. Why? Because they work seamlessly through the agents that we use for engineering. Beyond the mainline functions, they're exposing provisioning and configuration interfaces as well. They minimize the need for an agent to say, "Hey Brian, help an agent out. Go to that website over there, do a thing for me, and then tell me you did the thing. Thanks."

Solving that makes life a lot easier and has become absolutely central to our product decisioning. I think twice about products that require us to crack a browser and configure the tool manually through a UI. We prefer to do nearly everything through agents. When a product forces me back to a UI for setup, configuration, or management, that's a signal it wasn't built for how work is increasingly getting done.

Lemkin framed his scenario around churn risk, and he's right. The Trello example highlights that. But agents will increasingly drive net-new vendor selections as well. Agents don't use software the way humans do. They don't care about brand, the sales relationship, or the muscle memory that power users have built around the UI. They "care" whether they can reach your capabilities programmatically, reliably, and at the volume that agentic work demands. Agent experience or AX is a different art than UX.

The rubric for making product decisions is changing meaningfully, and a lot of legacy SaaS products are candidly not up to the challenge yet. We're fascinated by this dynamic. In fact, so much so that we started digging into how one might instrument or measure it. More on that to come.

References:

• Your Agents Are About to Start Firing Your Vendors. Ours Fired Marketo.