My opinion is that this idea that seems to be in the same direction of all SaaS is dead because everyone will just build their own products is true only for a subset of people.

I do agree in case of terminals this subset of people might overlap a lot with the entire market -> developers.

I see the future a bit different as in many people/companies will offer to the market some kind of building blocks that will be extra configurable by agents and then we are combining them.

In this case libghostty is such a component that can be integrated in a lot of things and people building those things want to work at a higher level of abstraction than building the terminal emulator. To be honest is among the best example of such a component that I see in the future that I think about.

AI is not magic; there is a fair amount of work involved in getting a complex piece of software correct and performant, and once someone has done that it makes way more sense to build on top of it than to reinvent the wheel.

Most people are in some way constrained in their AI usage, be it a session/week limit or the token pricing. So while you now can definitely build apps on your own you couldn’t before, you still have to make some economic considerations like before: My company is still not in the business of building terminal emulators. Even if an agent takes on the majority of the work to build one for me, I still have to invest some time and focus into directing it where I want it to go; it’s using up a big chunk of my usage limits if I want something anywhere near as polished as ghostty; and like all software, it wants permanent maintenance, bug fixes, and updates. AI doesn’t change any of that.

It’s time for the industry to realize that the weights may have shifted toward build vs. buy, but the general SaaS calculus is still in effect.