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AI is going to kill app subscriptions

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Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#151

Post by dist-epoch »

anonymous908213 wrote: post #46
dist-epoch wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Opportunity cost. Cloning Slack and wasting ultra-expensive engineers on that might be more expensive, and it's not your core mission.

Why do you have to waste ultra-expensive engineers on it? You have agents . And verifying your product works as it is claimed should absolutely be part of your mission. How can you possibly claim that your models are revolutionising software development if you haven't even used them to revolutionise your own software development in-house? Not only that, it would produce a huge marketing coup that would immediately le…

They did revolutionise software development in-house. Both Codex/Claude Code are 90% agent written these days, and bring in billions of dollars of revenue.

Cloning Slack would bring in $0 dollars.

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#152

Post by johneth »

colesantiago wrote: post #89
neya wrote: post #60

> it costs almost nothing to build an app, it costs almost nothing to clone an app. I guess the author hasn't done real software development. The cost isn't just for the code. It's for the whole process - especially the architecture. Which database to use for the use case, which framework and language to use, how the database should be structured,table naming standardization, best practices, security audits and every…

I vibecoded an app for my business and didn’t need any engineers and it is currently in use for our customers. I think this is great for everyone to be a developer, the gatekeeping has now been removed and we will see a creative explosion of apps that everyone can build. The security and maintenance aspect of apps is just a claude skill away to be a solved problem.

Comments as short-sighted as this give me confidence in the future job security of people who actually know how to write software.

> the gatekeeping has now been removed

'Gatekeeping' being 'knowing'... nobody was stopping you from learning.

> The security and maintenance aspect of apps is just a claude skill away to be a solved problem.

Incredible joke. Got a good laugh from me.

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#153

Post by anonymous908213 »

dist-epoch wrote: post #151
anonymous908213 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you have to waste ultra-expensive engineers on it? You have agents . And verifying your product works as it is claimed should absolutely be part of your mission. How can you possibly claim that your models are revolutionising software development if you haven't even used them to revolutionise your own software development in-house? Not only that, it would produce a huge marketing coup that would immediately le…

They did revolutionise software development in-house. Both Codex/Claude Code are 90% agent written these days, and bring in billions of dollars of revenue. Cloning Slack would bring in $0 dollars.

Billions of dollars of revenue on trillions of dollars of investment is not a revolutionary feat. I promise you I could turn trillions into billions too.

Neither of those software are primarily responsible for the revenue, either. The actual models underlying them are, not the trivial CLI chat interface (which, despite being trivial software, still manages to be full of bugs that go unfixed for months). I also don't even think it's true that Codex is primarily agent-written. OpenAI specifically cited using Electron in their recent Codex desktop application for "agent orchestration" to save human developer time on porting it across platforms, which does not sound like a successful exercise in eating their dog food.

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#154

Post by stmpjmpr »

neya wrote: post #147
tasuki wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This article was written by AI btw Unless you had an AI write the article, you can't possibly know that. I'm sick of this being randomly thrown around: it's basically mentioned for every article posted. Sometimes the author chimes in to say that no, they wrote it themselves. Other times sure, the article was written by AI. I don't know, and you don't know either .

It's not that hard to find out. Copy paste the text into any AI detector online. I pasted it into Grammarly and it says it's AI content with a 99% accuracy. Easiest way, however - any article that uses em dashes instead of regular hyphens is most likely AI. Normal bloggers, particularly in casual tech circles don't use em dashes. When was the last time you ever used an em dash? Me? Never.

I use them when appropriate, and have for long before LLMs were using them. I'm not going to stop now.

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#155

Post by dubeye »

neya wrote: post #60

> it costs almost nothing to build an app, it costs almost nothing to clone an app. I guess the author hasn't done real software development. The cost isn't just for the code. It's for the whole process - especially the architecture. Which database to use for the use case, which framework and language to use, how the database should be structured,table naming standardization, best practices, security audits and every…

I think there's different markets though, it's not just the enterprise market, is it? There's a huge market where security audits are not as important.

Personally, for my small business. I've replaced £500 Zapier subscription, £100 Todoist subscription, and I only haven't replaced the rest because I feel like there's not a huge rush. And it's been six months and nothing has fallen apart yet.

You might not think small business is relevant, but it absolutely is.

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#157

Post by joquarky »

neya wrote: post #147
tasuki wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This article was written by AI btw Unless you had an AI write the article, you can't possibly know that. I'm sick of this being randomly thrown around: it's basically mentioned for every article posted. Sometimes the author chimes in to say that no, they wrote it themselves. Other times sure, the article was written by AI. I don't know, and you don't know either .

It's not that hard to find out. Copy paste the text into any AI detector online. I pasted it into Grammarly and it says it's AI content with a 99% accuracy. Easiest way, however - any article that uses em dashes instead of regular hyphens is most likely AI. Normal bloggers, particularly in casual tech circles don't use em dashes. When was the last time you ever used an em dash? Me? Never.

> Copy paste the text into any AI detector online

The use of the word "any" here only emphasizes that this advice is not very valuable.

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#158

Post by joquarky »

onion2k wrote: post #24
camdenreslink wrote: post #7

Counterpoint, why do current state of the art generative AI companies, with the ability to use models that the public can't even access, and the ability to burn tokens at cost, still pay for very expensive Saas software?

That's really simple - actually writing the software has never really been the hard part in most SaaS apps. So long as you're moderately disciplined and organised it's easy to build what most SaaS apps are e.g. a CRUD-app-with-a-clever-bit. The clever bit is the initial challenge that sets it apart from the rest, but encoding that in software has never really been that difficult. Having the ideas necessary to know wh…

They just added task management in CC, which is a start in that direction.

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#159

Post by Ekaros »

dist-epoch wrote: post #34
camdenreslink wrote: post #7

Counterpoint, why do current state of the art generative AI companies, with the ability to use models that the public can't even access, and the ability to burn tokens at cost, still pay for very expensive Saas software?

Opportunity cost. Cloning Slack and wasting ultra-expensive engineers on that might be more expensive, and it's not your core mission.

If you have tools that allow superior efficiency shouldn't you be hiring every possible just expensive engineer you can get your hands on and put them to produce massive amounts of products to out compete everyone else in the world.

Shouldn't they be in place to replace absolutely every other tech company? That is tens of trillions of valuation in short few years.

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#160

Post by chrisjj »

gruez wrote: post #22
chrisjj wrote: post #2

> if it costs almost nothing to build an app, it costs almost nothing to clone an app. And if cloning is free, subscription pricing dies. "AI", the new Napster.

Where's the analogy breaks down is that AI isn't producing verbatim copies. There's no expectation that dropbox should be protected from clones, for instance.

How do you know you are not getting a copy identical to something the parrot found on the web?
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