Well, I'm commenting from a place of bias, as I'm Head of AI at our company and am in charge of rolling out agentic coding throughout the engineering org. So, bear with me a bit.

We're B2B SaaS in the Ed Tech space. It's very sales-driven. There's only so many players in the space, customers come with a laundry list of things they've seen others do and expect you to have those features, too. There are basic expectations that need to be met, some of those are compliance, but, sadly, a lot of what actually drives sales is just... flashy shit that looks good to those signing the checks not those using the underlying software. We lost a sale recently because someone was upset we didn't have the ability to give digital stickers to children - seriously.

You're more than welcome to tell the customer they're wrong and not give them their stickers. Or you can ask Claude to build stickers for you in two days and keep up with the Joneses.

Don't get me wrong. Customers aren't retained long-term with flashy shit. People churn out because of poor UX, security fears, pricing hikes, etc. Those frustrations tend to build over years and pain has to get pretty high because it's effortful to shift software providers. But, for getting new customers, sales is driven by flashy features and, at least in our experience, we need to be able to build those as quickly as our competitors or we lose out.

Upton Sinclair: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."