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Wall Street just lost $285B because of 13 Markdown files

martinalderson.com

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Re: Wall Street just lost $285B because of 13 Markdown files

#11

Post by H8crilA »

krupan wrote: post #4

I clicked and starting reading this expecting some actual connection between said markdown files and losing money. There was nothing at all like that in this blog post.

I don't understand why people think they know why stocks move up or down. There are clear cases from time to time, but in general the market doesn't explain itself. The reasons may not even be explainable in a way that's comprehensive to a human.

Reminds me of this question - why did the USSR collapse? You can describe dozens of influences which acted all at the same time, but there isn't a one paragraph summary answer.

Re: Wall Street just lost $285B because of 13 Markdown files

#12

Post by ajross »

Responding to the headline and not the article substance: no, the SaaS crash is a crash because valuations are speculative and have been very high. Security price motion is only very loosely coupled to fundamentals in the short term, and this moment in history is both highly volatile and unanimously held to be overpriced. Ergo, crash.

That doesn't speak to the fundamentals, with which I only sort of agree. There are SaaS products that just grease inter-human interactions that would be hard to manage otherwise, and these are dead in the water. There are others that manage data human beings will always need to be able to understand, even if the AI is doing the work[1], which are much safer.

[1] Like bug trackers. We all love to hate Jira, but even if you have an army of Claudes doing your coding and testing for you someone somewhere needs to know what still needs to be fixed before shipment.

Re: Wall Street just lost $285B because of 13 Markdown files

#13

Post by AnimalMuppet »

brazzy wrote: post #9
krupan wrote: post #4

I clicked and starting reading this expecting some actual connection between said markdown files and losing money. There was nothing at all like that in this blog post.

The connection is implied: technology companies quite suddenly lost a $285bn in market valuation, which means that the owners of these companies (either as stock or other forms of equity) have a combined $285bn less net worth. And apparently people are linking this sudden decrease in market valuation to "Anthropic launching a legal tool", which essentially consists of said markdown files.

This right here? This is why I read the comments first.

Re: Wall Street just lost $285B because of 13 Markdown files

#14

Post by alephnerd »

techblueberry wrote: post #3

One of the things about this whole death of SAAS thing is - People buy SAAS to offload the cognitive load of understanding the problem space, not just because it’s hard to write for loops. But writing code probably is a cost. I think there will be an impact but I wonder if - these big companies keep selling to big companies because no one wants to hire a whole ass compliance team to ensure the business logic is consi…

> One of the things about this whole death of SAAS [...]

If I purchase a swarm of domain-specific agents I am still purchasing software.

If I am building my own agents that I am monetizing I am still indirectly purchasing compute.

If I am purchasing Cursor licenses on a subscription I am still paying for code (also know as software) as a service.

The thing is, Agents and AI services are SaaS but not all SaaS is agents or AI.

> But like, how are IFTTT and zapier doing

Zapier is on track to exit either this year or next - they have a GAAP revenue of around $300M in FY25 and $400M at FY26 at a $5B valuation. They can justify a $6B-7B IPO.

Re: Wall Street just lost $285B because of 13 Markdown files

#16

Post by krupan »

brazzy wrote: post #9
krupan wrote: post #4

I clicked and starting reading this expecting some actual connection between said markdown files and losing money. There was nothing at all like that in this blog post.

The connection is implied: technology companies quite suddenly lost a $285bn in market valuation, which means that the owners of these companies (either as stock or other forms of equity) have a combined $285bn less net worth. And apparently people are linking this sudden decrease in market valuation to "Anthropic launching a legal tool", which essentially consists of said markdown files.

Clearly the author is implying that, but with zero evidence to back that implication up. Not even an attempt to link the two other than saying "this happened" and "this exists." And hacker news is upvoting it like it's actually an interesting article. Have we lost our brains?

Re: Wall Street just lost $285B because of 13 Markdown files

#17

Post by zozbot234 »

ozgrakkurt wrote: post #6

I am assuming the author doesn’t know much about how this flow actually goes since he didn’t get into that at all. It is annoying to see a complex field as law being judge by stock prices of some SaaS products or w/e they are basing this on. Could have at least gave it some effort and interviewed 2-3 people that use these kind of products but that would be too much work surely. It is not surprising that people that s…

> It is annoying to see a complex field as law being judge by stock prices of some SaaS products

They're not judging the whole field of law, they're judging the SaaS products themselves. In fact, relevant expertise from humans has probably become more valuable not less, as a result of general AI worflows replacing bespoke SaaS.

Re: Wall Street just lost $285B because of 13 Markdown files

#18

Post by AndrewDucker »

brazzy wrote: post #9
krupan wrote: post #4

I clicked and starting reading this expecting some actual connection between said markdown files and losing money. There was nothing at all like that in this blog post.

The connection is implied: technology companies quite suddenly lost a $285bn in market valuation, which means that the owners of these companies (either as stock or other forms of equity) have a combined $285bn less net worth. And apparently people are linking this sudden decrease in market valuation to "Anthropic launching a legal tool", which essentially consists of said markdown files.

But without knowing which stocks dropped, how can we make that link?

In another submission, Amazon, Oracle, Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, and Alphabet are all dropping. Are we supposed to think of them as SAAS companies now?

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/06/ai-sell-off-stocks-amazon-or...

Re: Wall Street just lost $285B because of 13 Markdown files

#20

Post by YetAnotherNick »

SaaS is generally defined as cloud based software. What has it do with easier replacement by AI?

In fact it should be opposite. Local utility software has higher chance of being replaced by AI as then you wouldn't worry about server and state and all the complexities of storage.

Also the article mention stock drop of "technology companies", which is basically stock drop of top 5 companies, like Nvidia and Apple, which is not even related to SaaS.

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