It’s a bit funny because I felt this way before coding agents as well, like you could clone something in just a few weeks. But in practice my expectations are rarely accurate.
Also, some software businesses use a ton of aggregated or hard to get data which needs to be synthesized and that doesn't go away even if the llm driven coding is cheap.
Your customers are more irrational than you are, and your appeal to them will likely need to resonate with them on an emotional level rather than logical one. I would argue that marketing is the hardest part of enterpreneurship, by far.
The circumstances that led to me trying to push River for the next few months were somewhat accidental, and it felt like a good moment to at least make a go of trying to make it work. I'm not committing the rest of my career/life to any particular decision one way or the other.
I'll reiterate too that I believe we're still quite early in the LLM age and are still waiting for the other shoe to drop. All LLM-generated software feels free at the moment because it's still novel and the exhilaration of accomplishment when you build something complex inside of a few hours is addictive beyond words. However, within a year or two I think we're going to have a lot more software, all of which needs maintaining to some degree, and we're going to become a little more reluctant to generate new projects to add to the heap. This'll cause an adjustment back to a more compromise position.
(Also, could be completely wrong about all of that, so take it for what it is.)
Build a good product and they will come.
That said, I think the path Brandur is describing is well-trodden and proven out by projects like Sidekiq.
Acquiring new software is a major commitment beyond just the price tag. It means integration, continuous maintenance, dealing with forced UI updates, supply chain exposure, and so on.
Every seasoned dev (unless very lucky) has dealt with bad software acquisitions, almost all of which seemed to be great deals at the time of purchase.