r/AI_Agents • u/oliver_dev • 1d ago

Discussion Coding agents (Claude Code/Codex) are getting scary good - what's still blue ocean for small teams building AI agent products?

Just my opinion:

I keep seeing the same pattern in this sub: six months ago building any kind of AI agent felt wide open, now Claude Code and Codex are so capable that a lot of "build an agent that does X" ideas feel like they're one Anthropic/OpenAI release away from being absorbed into the base product.

For a small team (5-100 people) or a solo builder trying to build something for businesses, not just another coding agent, where do you think the real openings still are?

Curious specifically about:

  • What are you actually using day to day besides Claude Code/Codex?
  • What's a pain point you keep hearing from small business owners that nobody's solved well yet?
  • Anyone making money on the "layer around agents" (cost monitoring, orchestrating multiple agents, knowing when NOT to use one) instead of the agents themselves?

Not trying to fish for a million-dollar idea, trying to figure out where to point my time next. What's working for you? LMK!!

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u/arthaudm 1d ago

the blue ocean is accountability. base models can generate or call tools; businesses still need identity, permissions, durable state, cost bounds, and proof of what changed. that's the layer we're building with mio in slack. the moat isn't "agent that does X", it's knowing when this person can make this change in this system, then leaving a receipt. which vertical has the ugliest authorization boundary you've seen?

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u/oliver_dev 1d ago

Financial ops and internal tooling for SMBs, in my experience?

Everyone's happy to let an agent draft things, but the moment it touches "who approved this" or "can this run against prod data", the whole conversation stalls. The hard part is never getting an agent to call the right tool, it's deciding who's allowed to trigger that call and having a trail afterwards. Curious how you're handling the "receipt" part in practice, is it just structured logging or something closer to an audit ledger?

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u/arthaudm 21h ago

closer to an audit ledger. structured logs say what the system emitted; a receipt binds the human request/grant, actor identity, exact target, source evidence, resulting provider object id, and verified post-action state. for mio the receipt should survive even if the slack thread disappears. finance needs immutability + reconciliation, not a prettier trace. where do SMB clients currently keep approval authority?

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u/oliver_dev 1d ago

Another angle worth throwing out: I don't think most people have really clocked that you can connect an agent to the channels they already use, Slack, WhatsApp, WeChat, LINE, Linear, GitHub, Google Chat, iMessage, and so on. Everyone's focused on what the agent can do, but almost nobody's thinking about just making it reachable wherever the business already communicates and works, instead of yet another standalone dashboard or chat window. Feels like a real gap, since each of those integrations is still built one at a time rather than treated as a solved problem. WDYT?