> Are you crazy?! Anything you ship can be instantly displaced by an internal package built by an LLM!
That's funny, the first thing every LLM I use generally does is install a bunch of third party packages...
The minimum viable unit of saleable software
51–60 of 89 posts
Re: The minimum viable unit of saleable software
#52I have multiple side projects that I would never have contemplated building before but whose utility now exceeds the much lower cost to build. I got a few weeks in to each and then stalled on all of them because the effort and motivation required to extend beyond the crazed early days _is_ still more than the utility I get. In a professional context, paying someone for software to do something outside my core domain…
If you're like me, then much of the utility was in the novelty itself. But I had that problem before AI :)
Re: The minimum viable unit of saleable software
#53Not everyone is a 200k engineer. Even kids with some hacker skills or university students with time > salary, who have access to LLM's, will start making cheaper alternatives and get into business that way for themselves.
Re: The minimum viable unit of saleable software
#54I recently asked Claude to duplicate Google Docs. It practically threw up. I tried to have it write a plan, decompose it, deobfuscate it. It gave me all sorts of reasons why this was a terrible idea. I've never seen it resist a task so directly and relentlessly. It knew. One point worth considering is that tools like Jira and Salesforce have dozens of screens and modals. But you only ever look at one at a time. So th…
I'm not sure I'm following you. What does 'duplicate Google Docs' mean? We already have OSS rich text editor (ProseMirror) and CRDT implementations (yjs, automerge). Are you talking about replicating every single enterprise Docs has? Integration with a large suite of other services you control? Replicating the business model too? 'duplicate Google Docs' spans everything from providing the actual service to replicatin…
I was looking for a dead on feature for feature exact replica including look and feel. You are 100% correct there are some excellent tools and libraries that duplicate most (all?) of the features. But I was playing around with the idea of what it would take for a perfect replica (for science of course). Turns out it's really hard even if you jump start it with those libraries and an existing reference implementation.
That was the point of my comment... Robust commercial software is hard.
Re: The minimum viable unit of saleable software
#55[flagged]
Re: The minimum viable unit of saleable software
#56I find that younger software engineers sometimes take the attitude of: Why would I pay for that when I could easily just do it on my own? As they grow and gain more responsibilities that flips to: Why would I build and maintain something on my own when I could pay someone else a few bucks to do it? At least I feel I went through this change as I grew professionally... So many things I am completely capable of doing o…
> and maintain
This right here is the key difference! Yes anyone can vibe code a replacement for many apps - but will it still run 2 years later (assuming they get it 'running' in an prod environment at all
Re: The minimum viable unit of saleable software
#57Be careful with making decisions about your livelihood based on a rational calculus. As you correctly point out, there is a threshold for which a programmer or company should not even blink at the cost of software. It's often the case that if the software they're buying saves one single hour of productivity, it's value-positive... and yet they won't buy it. Individual devs are notorious for refusing to pay a cent out…
Yes, I roughly agree with all of this. In fact, for most of my existence, I'm been one of those cheap programmers. The circumstances that led to me trying to push River for the next few months were somewhat accidental, and it felt like a good moment to at least make a go of trying to make it work. I'm not committing the rest of my career/life to any particular decision one way or the other. I'll reiterate too that I…
Another aspect Ive been talking about lately with the huge burst of AI productivity recently, is that its much simpler to point AI at the things that have been hanging out in the back of your mind. The things you started and got stuck. The bugs you sort of have an idea on but cant sit down and think through.
These are the obvious first targets to point AI at when onboarding. And it plows through a ton of the low hanging fruit. Then where are you after that? Suddenly productivity falls off a cliff and you are left in reality: good ideas are hard to come by and theres more to business than software.
The future is going to see an uptick in overall productivity for sure. And AI will tighten feedback loops enormously, in really positive ways. But current trajectories are already starting to come down to reality, and businesses are slowly realizing they still need to put in the hard work.
Unrelated: love your stuff. Ive gotten a lot out of your articles and I really appreciate you posting such well written content.
Re: The minimum viable unit of saleable software
#58As someone who built a niche SaaS I can see both sides of this.
If you are looking to replicate the exact same feature set of an existing product - buying would almost always be a better choice.
But it's rare for avg customer needs to perfectly match product features. Most often they need 20-40% of the product + some custom, business specific logic that's missing and is later fixed with spreadsheets/integrations. In that case it depends on how mission critical this software is.
I'd say investing into the core software that runs your business might very well be worth the effort, even if it's 10x between build vs buy.
Re: The minimum viable unit of saleable software
#59As someone who built a niche SaaS I can see both sides of this. If you are looking to replicate the exact same feature set of an existing product - buying would almost always be a better choice. But it's rare for avg customer needs to perfectly match product features. Most often they need 20-40% of the product + some custom, business specific logic that's missing and is later fixed with spreadsheets/integrations. In…
> even if it's 10x between build vs buy
think twice about this lol
Re: The minimum viable unit of saleable software
#60“buy vs. build. . . the calculus changed”
was the gun having a smoke?