Pattern: Prompt-to-App Platforms Are Losing to General Coding Agents

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GitHub retiring Spark on 2026-08-04 — with its `llm()` inference backend already dead since 2026-07-30 — is the clearest data point yet. GitHub's own stated reason is that builders can now do this work through Copilot in VS Code, Copilot CLI, and the Copilot app, i.e. the general agent absorbed the vertical product. This runs alongside the roughly 8,000-of-10,000 vibe-coded-startup rescue-engineering figure reported earlier this week: the constrained hosted builder failed to prevent the failure mode it was supposed to prevent, and its owner concluded the general agent is the better surface anyway.