alt Hacker NewsCompletely agree. Every SaaS tool will come with an MCP or an API to leverage composability. We can unlock useful functionalities from Claude Code and other aggregators (terminology from the post) to be able to compose different MCP's from different SaaS. One can imagine composing the results from a google search and using it in for a Figma design attempt, as a simple example.
This is an obvious direction that the industry is heading to. But what are the implications of this? I think the differentiating factor of having a good UI will reduce - productivity apps and SaaS will no longer have their aesthetic UI as a moat. I'm not sure whether this will tank their stocks or increase the valuation but what I'm sure of is that the productivity and usage will increase.
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Several points -
First, mcp, like cli, like api, is a kind of (user facing) interface, just not graphical. It still needs to be designed, just by different people with differing skills.
Second, textual interface can only go so far in terms of information ingestion. Trying to describe a complex relationship between entities can be extremely difficult with text. However, a good graphical interface will make complex information easier to digest.
So in my opinion, the moat will emphasize organization which knows how to plan good a custom experience, whether graphical or textual, and less where tables and forms are the main business
Previously, a lot of SaaS’s valuation was dependent on it being a ‘platform’ where their customers ‘do almost everything only on their platform’, keeping them within that SaaS’s ecosystem.
By making the tools compostable, the valuation from this ‘keeping within’ angle will slowly disappear, but maybe it can be replaced by increase usage as a source of valuation.
I mean, this was the web 2.0 dream. And then everyone realized that giving people an easy way out of your platform wasn't good for business. And all of the APIs dried up. Tremendously disappointing.
We'll see if this time, things end differently.
The combinatorial utility of different MCPs / APIs inside an agent is an interesting angle. Figma can technically plug into the same MCPs and use all the same models, but if the software design process doesn’t start in Figma anymore, it does not matter. The value will accrue to the point of integration (the agent).
Re: the value of good UI/UX
I think short-term, the value of good interfaces will actually increase - if anyone can easily build out the same product in 10 different ways, the best designed one that people actually want to use will likely be the choice. But that’s holding constant lots of things like distribution, type of SaaS, its place in the transaction stack, etc. So either guess would make a lot of assumptions.
It also appears (so far at least) that these models really struggle with front-end design. Something like /frontend-design skill is good but only gets you so far. It still requires a ton of steering to get it to a sensical place. So for now, whoever can steer it is still valuable. But I’m sure more and more of that will get codified and internalized by the model and the harness. So the design steering will become more and more abstract.
Long-term, we’re likely moving towards dynamically generated interfaces. Claude is already doing it with diagrams and charts in the chat. This opens up so many fascinating questions. What happens when UI doesn’t have to be one-size-fits-all, where each person may get their GUI generated with their preferences and context in mind? What happens to the design process when your UI doesn’t have to scale to a ton of user types and use cases? Will we even be designing UIs or something else entirely? Will Jakob’s Law still apply or will our individual GUIs diverge so much that I won’t be able to navigate your smartphone if I pick it up?