As an outsider to the US ecosystem, a lot of the surrounding startup activity feels strange to me. Many companies seem to be building thin wrappers, agent orchestration layers, AI-generated apps, or B2B tools whose main customers appear to be other AI startups.

At the same time, the social and funding environment seems extremely intense. Everyone is excited by “solving a problem,” everyone is racing toward YC or seed funding like it’s the new Stanford acceptance letter.

Do people inside this SF ecosystem not see how weird this looks, or is there something I’m missing? Is it just peer illusion, where everyone is surrounded by people building, funding, and hyping the same things until it starts to feel real? Or am I wrong, and the future really is DevOps agents, AI SDRs, browser operators, vibe-coded internal tools, and agent slop apps selling to other agent slop app companies?

Right now, a lot of it looks circular to me: AI startups selling vibe-codeable-in-two-days products to AI startups so they can build more tools for AI startups. The revenue frontier for this space mostly seems to be coming from this aspect, which continues to eat up the investment money, which will be drained at some point.

What are your thoughts?

I would suggest reading some of the publications of this economist related to the economic impacts of tech: https://carlotaperez.org/publications/

also look at this AI economic intelligence dashboard: https://tokenando.ai/insight