From: https://www.citriniresearch.com/p/2028gic which is what the guardian is writing about:

That destroyed a particular kind of moat: habitual intermediation.

DoorDash (DASH US) was the poster child.

Coding agents had collapsed the barrier to entry for launching a delivery app. A competent developer could deploy a functional competitor in weeks, and dozens did, enticing drivers away from DoorDash and Uber Eats by passing 90-95% of the delivery fee through to the driver. Multi-app dashboards let gig workers track incoming jobs from twenty or thirty platforms at once, eliminating the lock-in that the incumbents depended on. The market fragmented overnight and margins compressed to nearly nothing.

Agents accelerated both sides of the destruction. They enabled the competitors and then they used them. The DoorDash moat was literally “you’re hungry, you’re lazy, this is the app on your home screen.” An agent doesn’t have a home screen. It checks DoorDash, Uber Eats, the restaurant’s own site, and twenty new vibe-coded alternatives so it can pick the lowest fee and fastest delivery every time.

Anyone who has used these agent can see this with a bit of futurism… With the caveat that it’s never as simple as a single prompt should be. They are incredibly savant like at time, and then they make the dumbest contextual mistake that you have to chase down for hours. Which is to say the markets are idiots as usual. (Along side CEOs.) These agents aren’t up to the hype, their investment, nor their ability to code without security flaws. Just let it keep singing: “If I only had a brain” and hanging scarecrows up in the windows.