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AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

martinalderson.com

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Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#61

Post by sotrusting »

protocolture wrote: post #46
sotrusting wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

>Ah yes, blindly trusting the corpo fascists that stole the entire creative output of humanity to stop now. Stealing implies the thing is gone, no longer accessible to the owner. People aren't protected from copying in the same way. There are lots of valid exclusions, and building new non competing tools is a very common exclusion. The big issue with the OpenAI case, is that they didn't pay for the books. Scanning th…

> Stealing implies the thing is gone, no longer accessible to the owner.

You know a position is indefensible when you equivocation fallacy this hard.

> The "Corpo Fascists" are buoyed by your support for the IP laws

You know a position is indefensible when you strawman this hard.

> If anything, to be less "Corpo Fascist" we would want more people to have more access to more data. Mankind collectively owns the creative output of Humanity, and should be able to use it to make derivative works.

Sounds about right to me, but why you would state that when defending slop slingers is enough to give me whiplash.

> Scanning them and using them for training is very much likely to be protected.

Where can I find these totally legal, free, and open datasets all of these slop slingers are trained on?

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#64

Post by sotrusting »

yieldcrv wrote: post #52
protocolture wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where are they ignoring the law?

people that say this tend to have a misinterpretation of copyright, and use all the court cases brought by large rights holders as validation despite all 3 branches of the government disagreeing with them over and over again

[flagged]

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#65

Post by bdangubic »

findjashua wrote: post #19
Oarch wrote: post #9

Earlier this year I thought that rare proprietary knowledge and IP was a safe haven from AI, since LLMs can only scrub public data. Then it dawned on me how many companies are deeply integrating Copilot into their everyday workflows. It's the perfect Trojan Horse.

providers' ToS explicitly states whether or not any data provided is used for training purposes. the usual that i've seen is that while they retain the right to use the data on free tiers, it's almost never the case for paid tiers

it is amazing in almost 2026 there is anyone believing this… amazing

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#66

Post by technotony »

andy_ppp wrote: post #41

I’m currently working on an in house ERP and inventory system for a specific kind of business. With very few people you can now instead of paying loads of money for some off the shelf solution to your software needs get something completely bespoke to your business. I think AI enables the age of boutique software that works fantastically for businesses, agencies will need to dramatically reduce their price to compete…

Interesting application. Can you share more about your stack and how you are approaching that build?

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#67

Post by MyFirstSass »

bgwalter wrote: post #15

The author teaches workshops for "AI" development. Next commercial please.

Hackernews seems completely astroturfed in the last weeks.

It's not the hackernews i knew even 3 years ago anymore and i'm seriously close to just ditching the site after 15+ years of use.

I use AI heavily but everyday there's crazy optimistic almost manic posts about how AI is going to take over various sectors that are completely ludicrous - and they are all filled with comments from bizarrely optimistic people that have seemingly no knowledge of how software is actually run or built, ie. it's the human organisational, research and management elements that are the hard parts, something AI can't do in any shape or form at the moment for any complex or even small company.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#68

Post by phendrenad2 »

Oarch wrote: post #9

Earlier this year I thought that rare proprietary knowledge and IP was a safe haven from AI, since LLMs can only scrub public data. Then it dawned on me how many companies are deeply integrating Copilot into their everyday workflows. It's the perfect Trojan Horse.

Ironically (for you), copilot is the one provider that is doing a good job of provably NOT training on user data. The rest are not up to speed on that compliance angle, so many companies ban them (of course, people still use them).

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#69

Post by popalchemist »

Aurornis wrote: post #16
Oarch wrote: post #9

Earlier this year I thought that rare proprietary knowledge and IP was a safe haven from AI, since LLMs can only scrub public data. Then it dawned on me how many companies are deeply integrating Copilot into their everyday workflows. It's the perfect Trojan Horse.

Using an LLM on data does not ingest that data into the training corpus. LLMs don’t “learn” from the information they operate on, contrary to what a lot of people assume. None of the mainstream paid services ingest operating data into their training sets. You will find a lot of conspiracy theories claiming that companies are saying one thing but secretly stealing your data, of course.

Wrong, buddy.

Many of the top AI services use human feedback to continuously apply "reinforcement learning" after the initial deployment of a pre-trained model.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement_learning_from_hu...

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#70

Post by Aurornis »

andy_ppp wrote: post #41

I’m currently working on an in house ERP and inventory system for a specific kind of business. With very few people you can now instead of paying loads of money for some off the shelf solution to your software needs get something completely bespoke to your business. I think AI enables the age of boutique software that works fantastically for businesses, agencies will need to dramatically reduce their price to compete…

> Why pay for SaaS when you can build something “good enough” in a week or two?

About a decade ago we worked with a partner company who was building their own in-house software for everything. They used it as one of their selling points and as a differentiator over competitors.

They could move fast and add little features quickly. It seemed cool at first.

The problems showed up later. Everything was a little bit fragile in subtle ways. New projects always worked well on the happy path, but then they’d change one thing and it would trigger a cascade of little unintended consequences that broke something else. No problem, they’d just have their in-house team work on it and push out a new deploy. That also seemed cool at first, until they accumulated a backlog of hard to diagnose issues. Then we were spending a lot of time trying to write up bug reports to describe the problem in enough detail for them to replicate, along with constant battles over tickets being closed with “works in the dev environment” or “cannot reproduce”.

> You also get exactly what you want rather than some £300k per year CRM

What’s the fully loaded (including taxes and benefits) cost of hiring enough extra developers and ops people to run and maintain the in house software, complete with someone to manage the project and enough people to handle ops coverage with room for rotations and allowing holidays off? It turns out the cost of running in-house software at scale is always a lot higher than 300K, unless the company can tolerate low ops coverage and gaps when people go on vacation.

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