Some of what Amplitude, Mixpanel and PostHog sold for years is getting cheaper: collecting user events, querying them quickly and measuring engagement. An open-source collector like Jitsu can deliver events to a warehouse, and a coding agent can write the analysis on top.
The vendors seem to agree with part of this. All three now run MCP servers that Claude Code, Cursor and Codex can connect to. Mixpanel also released an open-source SDK specifically for coding agents, and PostHog released a desktop app that runs Claude Code and Codex with product data as context. A vendor that opens its product to a customer's own agent is no longer selling the query interface as the main thing.
Looking at what they released this year, the value has moved rather than disappeared. I see three places.
The first is definitions. PostHog's semantic layer documentation starts with the problem: ask three AI tools for MRR and you get three different queries and three different numbers. Their answer is a catalog where agents can propose a metric, but only a person can approve it. Mixpanel and Amplitude let teams give their agents written business context for the same reason.
The second is behavioral correctness. Identity across devices and logins, sessions, ordered funnels and retention windows are implemented once inside these tools. In a warehouse they are SQL that someone has to write and keep correct. Jitsu, for example, does not compute sessions by default.
The third is the loop around the data: feature flags, experiments, session replay, and now agents that watch dashboards and report problems without being asked. PostHog's agents can open a pull request from a product signal.
I think a team with a warehouse, people who model data and mostly technical users can build this themselves. The parts exist, and the definitions are work they should do anyway. A team where most questions come from product managers and marketers, or that runs many experiments, still gets a lot from the packaged tool.
What is not settled is where the definitions will live. The vendors are building catalogs for them, and a company can also keep them in its own warehouse.