“Anyone Can Code Now” - Netlify CEO Talks AI Agents
Netlify's CEO, Matt Biilmann, reveals a seismic shift nobody saw coming: 16,000 daily signups—five times last year's rate—and 96% aren't coming from AI coding tools. They're everyday people accidentally building React apps through ChatGPT, then discovering they need somewhere to deploy them. The addressable market for developer tools just exploded from 17 million JavaScript developers to 3 billion spreadsheet users, but only if your product speaks fluent AI—which is why Netlify's founder now submits pull requests he built entirely through prompting, never touching code himself, and why 25% of users immediately copy error messages to LLMs instead of debugging manually. The web isn't dying to agents; it's being reborn by them, with CEOs coding again and non-developers shipping production apps while the entire economics of software—from perpetual licenses to subscriptions to pure usage—gets rewritten in real-time.
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20Product: How to Design and Build Products in a World of Agents | Why AI Will Kill Many SaaS Products | What Products Will Thrive and Die in a World of 100M Developers with Matt Biilmann, Co-Founder and CEO @ Netlify
Matt Biilmann is the Co-Founder and CEO @ Netlify. Under his leadership, Netlify has become one of the fastest-growing platforms for modern web development. Matt recently introduced agent experience (AX), a new way of thinking about how software is built and experienced in the AI era. Matt is also known for coining Jamstack, a concept that redefined how developers build for the web.
In Today's Episode We Discuss:
03:43 How Does the Design Process Change When Designing For Agents
06:27 How Does the Product Building Process Change When Building for Agents
12:52 Will AI Kill SaaS Tools
16:12 If Prototyping Becomes Phase 1: Does Figma Survive?
17:35 Is Chat the Best Interface for a World of AI
21:52 Why AI Services Will Be One of the Biggest Economies
27:24 Open vs. Closed Platforms in an Agent-First World
31:09 Specialization of Large Language Models
35:13 Shifting Labor Costs to Agent Spend
36:28 The Future of Stripe and What Happens with 100M Developers in the World
38:39 Quickfire Round: Insights and Predictions
Netlify CEO Matt Biilmann explains what we'll see with UI 2.0
Biilmann says we can't ignore the impact GenAI is having on developer productivity. One of their engineers created a GPT that automatically generates stories for React + TypeScript components, and after seeing how successful it was internally, Netlify made it open source for the public.
We also chat over the results of their recent State of Web Development survey. The key takeaway is below:
The 80% of developers that have integrated AI into their workflow are quickly reaping the benefits. Seventy percent report using AI to automate manual and repetitive tasks and 42% are using it to improve internal knowledge sharing and increase productivity, freeing up more time for impactful work and enabling faster launch times. Over 50% of developers also realized new opportunities that AI created, such as generating new web projects with a single prompt or reading API documentation.
However, AI experimentation is not without its own unique challenges. Developers are concerned about receiving incorrect answers and information (65%), security issues and leaking confidential information (52%), a lack of regulation (48%), and a decrease in code quality (45%).
So much opportunity, but plenty of risk as well.
Last but not least, Biilmann tells us what he's looking forward to in the near future, specifically apps that can reformat their UI on the fly to be more customized to each user. He calls this UI 2.0, and it sounds a bit like what Google showed off in its recent Gemini demo.
Congrats to our lifeboat winner of the week, Petrus Theron, who answered the question: How can I make a public struct where all fields are public without repeating `pub` for every field?
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Composable architecture
At Netlify Compose 2023, Biilmann announced their new composable web platform.
This isn’t Netlify’s first rodeo—we talked to them for episodes 588 and 456.
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Today’s shoutout goes to Dick Lucas who asked a topical question, How to prevent Netlify from treating warnings as errors because process.env.CI = true?, viewed by over 84,000 people.
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