I was talking to Jeff Lawson the other day and he said something really interesting I hadn't really considered the nuance. I always considered Twilio, DigitalOcean, Sendgrid etc "dev tools" - but Jeff said I was wrong and they are supply chain primitives/components. DevTools are more like IDEs in this lens.
Only reason I bring it up is related to your moat comment. supply chain stuff is tied into workflow that becomes institutionalized, and typically more b2b, dev tools are more like b2c, so you really have to compete on merits hard, moats of b2c2b look to Slack or anything with seats/licenses/team features.
In the new AI world we can see it starting to emerge, on one hand you have something like Cursor, on the other something like charlielabs.ai - Will be interesting to see how it all plays out, but I wanted to just add some nuance I've been thinking about recently. :)
(full disclosure I'm considering joining charlie labs, don't want to be accused of shilling later if I do.)
Only reason I bring it up is related to your moat comment. supply chain stuff is tied into workflow that becomes institutionalized, and typically more b2b, dev tools are more like b2c, so you really have to compete on merits hard, moats of b2c2b look to Slack or anything with seats/licenses/team features.
In the new AI world we can see it starting to emerge, on one hand you have something like Cursor, on the other something like charlielabs.ai - Will be interesting to see how it all plays out, but I wanted to just add some nuance I've been thinking about recently. :)
(full disclosure I'm considering joining charlie labs, don't want to be accused of shilling later if I do.)