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AI is killing B2B SaaS

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Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#391

Post by groundzeros2015 »

alphager wrote: post #376
groundzeros2015 wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "just do the parts of it we actually use". 25 years here. You can absolutely do this. Most software is orders of magnitude more complex than it needs to be. The junior programmer you are talking about who wanted to rewrite it in a weekend tends to come back with a working program, not empty handed.

I've seen this happen with both juniors and seniors. They do come back with a working solution /for the happy path/. Because the happy path is easy. It turns out that most of the complexity sits in the unhappy paths.

I still don’t agree. The trick to good design is getting more things on the happy path. Most of the software I use is small and constructed in this manner.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#392

Post by mvkel »

It's this generation's "build vs buy." I imagine it will play out the same way, like a revolving door. Customers churn because they can "build it themselves," then a year later when they're sick of maintaining a mess of code for some internal system instead of delivering value to their own customers, they come back. A blip.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#393

Post by heavyset_go »

georgeecollins wrote: post #319
baxtr wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This vibe-coding-will-replace-SaaS insanity is the new crypto-will-replace-fiat-money insanity.

I don't think vibe-coding will replace anything. However, what if AI tools can make skilled developers more productive, particularly at simple tasks in unfamiliar environments? You could see that reducing the engineering costs of simple utility applications. There are tons of pitfalls that many here have pointed to but also maybe opportunities to do things that wouldn't have been cost effective. Also: In my life the…

> I don't think vibe-coding will replace anything. However, what if AI tools can make skilled developers more productive, particularly at simple tasks in unfamiliar environments?

That's not good enough.

Now that the world has successfully laughed off the "our models are so good they're superintelligent" AGI claims, AI companies and investors have moved on to the "our models are so good they're going to do all your workers' jobs" angle.

The insane investment is for AGI/total job replacement, not developer productivity tools. We are going to be sold pie-in-the-sky claims for a long time until the world wisens up to this rhetoric the same way we did with AGI nonsense.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#394

Post by mvkel »

mym1990 wrote: post #216
bandrami wrote: post #162

It's a tale as old as time that developers, particularly junior developers, are convinced they could "slap together something in one weekend" that would replace expensive SAAS software and "just do the parts of it we actually use". Unfortunately, the same arguments against those devs regular-coding a bespoke replacement apply to them vibe-coding a bespoke replacement: management simply doesn't want to be responsible…

We are certainly closer now to being able to prototype and go to market faster with a product. In one weekend is a little much but I think its hard to deny that building will continue to expedite. What most developers don't think about is that the marketing, sales, customer service are all non-trivial parts of the business/product and all require legwork that is more than just sitting at an IDE. The nail in the coffi…

> We are certainly closer now to being able to prototype and go to market faster with a product

Absolutely. But this begs the question that businesses want to also sign up to maintain whatever product they've built, on top of their core business.

"Service" is the word that people seem to be forgetting in SaaS. If you roll you own, all you have is software.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#395

Post by edoceo »

bawolff wrote: post #371
GorbachevyChase wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can gin these things up in a weekend then why would you bother with a monthly subscription model for software? The only valuable part is the specification and possibly the hardware to run it. If I were a CTO trying to save money I might pay for the labor to develop good specs, but I would prioritize getting out from under software companies with a rent seeking models and 80 to 90% margins

> If I were a CTO trying to save money A CTOs job isn't to save money but to spend money effectively. Saving money by increasing risk is not neccesarily a prudent move.

On prudent choices: one thing I'm surprised about is that LLMs are showing me libraries and tools that I'd not found via search.

A boring one from today was about select, datalist or some custome element (which LLM can prototype) or some JS libs. Good breakdown; links to playgrounds, rough mocks so team could kick tires. It raises points the team had and had counterpoint to help drive decisions.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#397

Post by kstrauser »

bandrami wrote: post #162

It's a tale as old as time that developers, particularly junior developers, are convinced they could "slap together something in one weekend" that would replace expensive SAAS software and "just do the parts of it we actually use". Unfortunately, the same arguments against those devs regular-coding a bespoke replacement apply to them vibe-coding a bespoke replacement: management simply doesn't want to be responsible…

OTOH, I was hired by an enterprise that was many months into a giant backend rewrite. After wrapping my head around the many plans, I realized they were rewriting Django, badly. One weekend I prototyped the whole thing… in Django. It worked. It met the specs. It was a CRUD app with a REST API.

I came in to work Monday morning, showed it off, and inadvertently triggered a firestorm. Later my boss told me not to do that again because it caused havoc with schedules and such.

So I quit and found a better job. Sometimes the new guy can make a better version themselves over the weekend, not because they’re a supergenius, but because they’re not hampered by 47 teams all trying to get their stamp on the project.

(In before “prime example of overconfidence!”: feel free to doubt. It was a CRUD app with a handful of models on a PostgreSQL backend. They were writing a new Python web framework to serve it, complete with their own ORM and forms library and validation library. Not because the existing ones wouldn’t work, mind you, but more out of not realizing that all these problems were already sufficiently solved for their requirements.)

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#398

Post by noduerme »

bandrami wrote: post #162

It's a tale as old as time that developers, particularly junior developers, are convinced they could "slap together something in one weekend" that would replace expensive SAAS software and "just do the parts of it we actually use". Unfortunately, the same arguments against those devs regular-coding a bespoke replacement apply to them vibe-coding a bespoke replacement: management simply doesn't want to be responsible…

My career occupies a weird middle ground where, for 20 years or so, I've catered to smaller businesses that need bespoke solutions (because the SaaS available doesn't conform well to their business logic), but don't have the scale or desire to build and maintain software in-house. Sometimes these are slapped together in a weekend, if that's all that's needed. But in most cases they still become ongoing improvement and maintenance projects for me.

This niche position has had some interesting ramifications for them and for me. They clearly incur a lot of technical debt once their business relies on bespoke software. On the other hand, they own the software and can get an immediate response or new feature or upgrade from me, limited only by my time. And in the end, this ends up saving them time and money. It gives me a permanent and unending flow of work. But if I die, they're pretty screwed.

One reason I don't vibe code things even now, even simple components that could easily be vibe coded, is that I remember and know where everything is, every function or line of code that might be causing issues, because I wrote it myself. I know right away where to look for a query that might be throwing errors after a database upgrade, for instance.

As a manager I assume you would probably not want to go down the road of hiring someone like that, but for companies of a certain size it's an acceptable compromise. However, I wouldn't want to hire someone like that myself unless they were extremely reliable and didn't rely on AI to write any of their code.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#399

Post by hinkley »

overfeed wrote: post #255
mym1990 wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are certainly closer now to being able to prototype and go to market faster with a product. In one weekend is a little much but I think its hard to deny that building will continue to expedite. What most developers don't think about is that the marketing, sales, customer service are all non-trivial parts of the business/product and all require legwork that is more than just sitting at an IDE. The nail in the coffi…

> We are certainly closer now to being able to prototype and go to market faster with a product. What are the higher-order effects when anyone can do this, and *aaS becomes a market for Lemons?

Exactly. Once the market tastes like lemonade, everyone will be afraid of trying new apps in the way that they are afraid to accept phone calls from unknown numbers now.

You will trade initial development budget for advertising budget, trying to position your product in proximity with people who are known quantities.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#400

Post by noduerme »

kstrauser wrote: post #397
bandrami wrote: post #162

It's a tale as old as time that developers, particularly junior developers, are convinced they could "slap together something in one weekend" that would replace expensive SAAS software and "just do the parts of it we actually use". Unfortunately, the same arguments against those devs regular-coding a bespoke replacement apply to them vibe-coding a bespoke replacement: management simply doesn't want to be responsible…

OTOH, I was hired by an enterprise that was many months into a giant backend rewrite. After wrapping my head around the many plans, I realized they were rewriting Django, badly. One weekend I prototyped the whole thing… in Django. It worked. It met the specs. It was a CRUD app with a REST API. I came in to work Monday morning, showed it off, and inadvertently triggered a firestorm. Later my boss told me not to do tha…

Take this idea and bring your own validation library and forms and UI components to the next job, and you've described what I do. And then you have real lock-in.
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