The Collaboration Theater Is Over
Remember when your PM would drop a "quick sync?" in Slack at 3pm and you'd lose the next hour of your life? Remember when every PR needed a 45-minute Zoom where three people argued about variable names while the fourth person was clearly playing Valorant?
Yeah. That era is dead. You just haven't realized you're attending its funeral.
The Numbers Don't Lie
Let me hit you with some stats that should terrify every SaaS company charging per-seat:
41% of code on GitHub is now AI-generated. Not "assisted" - generated. 256 billion lines in 2024 alone.
Between May and September 2025, coding agents created over 1 million pull requests. And these weren't toy repos - they were production codebases with thousands of stars.
But here's the kicker: while commits went up 25%, comments on commits dropped 27%. Pull requests increased 20%, but meaningful code review is falling off a cliff.
Why? Because developers aren't getting more careless. They're getting more confident.
The modern PR review isn't a code review. It's a ritual:
- ✅ Tests pass? Check.
- ✅ Coverage looks good? Check.
- ✅ Follows our patterns? Check.
- LGTM 🚢
That's not collaboration. That's a rubber stamp with extra steps.
The Slack Spiral Is Dying
Here's what collaboration used to look like:
- Dev writes code
- Opens PR
- Three teammates start "reviewing"
- 47 Slack messages later...
- "Can we hop on a quick call?"
- 30-minute Zoom where everyone's cameras are off
- 12 Jira comments explaining what was already explained in Slack
- Finally merge after someone finds a typo in a comment
Here's what it looks like now:
- Dev + AI pair program
- AI writes tests automatically
- CI goes green
- LGTM spam
- Merge
Notice what's missing? All the human-to-human coordination overhead.
Your CFO Is Going to Notice
You know what's hilarious? Your company is still paying for:
- Slack Enterprise ($15/user/month)
- Jira Software ($8.15/user/month)
- Confluence ($6.05/user/month)
- Zoom ($20/user/month)
For a 100-person engineering team, that's $4,920/month or $59,040/year just for these tools.
But when 40% of your code is AI-written, and PRs are getting LGTM'd with zero actual discussion... why do you need 100 paid seats?
You need like 30. Maybe 40 if you're being generous.
The Renewal Cliff Is Coming
These SaaS companies have been coasting on 90%+ net retention rates for years. Their entire business model assumes every company keeps adding seats as they grow.
But here's what's about to happen:
- CFO asks: "Why do we have 500 Slack licenses?"
- Engineering manager: "Uh... good question actually"
- Audit shows 200+ licenses inactive or barely used
- Cut to 200 licenses
- Discover nothing breaks
- Next year, cut to 100
It's not even malicious. It's just... AI agents don't need Slack accounts. And developers using AI don't need to "hop on a quick call" eight times a day.
The "Quick Sync" Is the New "Can I Mint Your JPEG?"
You know how in 2021 everyone was like "bro you need to get into NFTs, it's the future of digital ownership!" and now mentioning NFTs at a party is social suicide?
That's where "let's huddle real quick" is headed.
In 2027, when someone Slacks you "quick sync?" you're going to look at them the way you look at someone asking if you want to invest in their Web3 startup.
"Bro... we have AI for this."
What This Actually Means
I'm not saying human collaboration is dead. I'm saying synchronous collaboration as the default is dead.
The collaboration that matters now is:
- Designing the right prompts for your AI pair
- Reviewing AI-generated architectures (not line-by-line code)
- Async decision-making in design docs
- Actual strategic planning (not "let's align on ticket 3847")
Everything else? That's just theater to justify the SaaS subscriptions your company is hemorrhaging money on.
The Inverse 401k Play
Here's my spicy take: if you're smart, you're not just using this trend - you're betting on it.
While everyone else has their 401k loaded with NASDAQ tech stocks, I'm slowly building a "beer money" short position against these productivity SaaS giants. Atlassian, Slack, the whole crew.
Not because their products suck. Because their business model - charge per seat, assume infinite growth in seats - is about to run headfirst into reality.
When renewals start coming up and CFOs realize they can cut 40-60% of licenses with zero impact, the revenue cliff is going to be spectacular.
In Case You Missed The Big Short
You know what made The Big Short brilliant? Michael Burry didn't bet against the economy. He didn't bet against real estate. He bet against the second-order market - the CDOs, the synthetic derivatives built on top of mortgages.
The big dogs never fail. Microsoft isn't going anywhere. Google isn't collapsing. AWS will print money forever.
But the second-order ecosystem that exists because of human collaboration patterns? The per-seat SaaS tools that only work when humans need to coordinate constantly?
That's your mortgage-backed security waiting to implode.
Atlassian doesn't write code. Slack doesn't build products. They're derivatives of human collaboration. And when the underlying asset (human-to-human coordination) gets replaced by human-to-AI coordination... the derivative goes to zero.
The big main dogs never fail. It's always the second-order markets.
Disclaimer: This is not financial advice. I'm a developer ranting on the internet, not your financial advisor. Do your own research. Don't bet money you can't afford to lose. Seriously, I could be completely wrong and Atlassian could 10x tomorrow because they pivot to selling AI seat licenses or something. This is entertainment and opinion, not investment guidance.
TL;DR
- 41% of code is AI-generated right now
- PR reviews are becoming LGTM rubber stamps
- Synchronous collaboration is dying
- Your company is paying for 500 Slack seats when you need 150
- The "quick huddle" is the new "mint my NFT"
- Short the per-seat SaaS model
The AI agent era isn't coming. It's here. And it's about to absolutely wreck the business models of every company that assumed humans would always need to Slack each other 47 times before merging a PR.
Your "let's huddle" isn't just annoying anymore.
It's obsolete.
What do you think? Are you still doing synchronous code reviews, or have you embraced the LGTM spam era? Drop your takes in the comments - or don't, because async is the future anyway. 😏
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