Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

martinalderson.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 398 posts

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#181

Post by a2code »

jwr wrote: post #166
a2code wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have two tech q about partsbox. Why Clojure? Why not CL (lack of saas related-features)?

Clojure is just better than CL in pretty much every respect. Excellent and well designed standard library, great concurrency primitives, core.async, built-in transducers (CL has SERIES which does a kind-of similar thing, but isn't as well designed and integrated) and the dominant immutability all let me write more maintainable code. Also, I can re-use model code on the client side (ClojureScript), so there is lots of…

I did not try Clojure so I cannot comment on how well implemented the features you quote are, when compared to CL. All I can say is that CL also provides much of the same functionality with its standard, cl-async, lparallel, parenscript, while (im)mutability is a matter of preference (IMO correct decision by CL) rather than dominance. The way I see it, is that CL is superior (opinion) due to reader macros and native compilation, rather than bytecode JVM.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#182

Post by nprateem »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #168
skywhopper wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming this ever works, this is no threat to the SaaS industry. If anything it increases its importance.

SaaS products rely on resisting commoditization. AI agents defeat that.

Yes, except for the fact that any non-trivial saas does non-trivial stuff that an agent will be able to call (as the 'secretary') while the user still has to pay the subscription to use.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#183

Post by dismalpedigree »

jwr wrote: post #135

I am the founder of a niche SaaS ( https://partsbox.com/ — software for managing electronic parts inventory and production). While I am somewhat worried about AI capabilities, I'm not losing too much sleep over it. The worry is that customers who do not realize the full depth of the problem will implement their own app using AI. But that happens today, too: people use spreadsheets to manage their electronic parts (pl…

Not specific to PartsBox, but we use Inventree (open source similar to PartsBox) and self host it. Over the past few months we noticed certain pain points in our workflow. Rather than looking for a new tool, we used Claude Code to write some backend services and some frontend modifications. Took 2 days of tinkering. Has easily saved that much time since we implemented it.

While rolling the whole solution with an AI agent is not practical, taking a open source starting point and using AI to overcome specific workflow pain points as well as add features allows me to have a lower cost, specifically tailored solution to our needs.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#184

Post by j45 »

benzible wrote: post #124

I'm CTO at a vertical SaaS company, paired with a product-focused CEO with deep domain expertise. The thesis doesn't match my experience. For one thing, the threat model assumes customers can build their own tools. Our end users can't. Their current "system" is Excel. The big enterprises that employ them have thousands of devs, but two of them explicitly cloned our product and tried to poach their own users onto it.…

Customers will be able to build skills.

Not being able to see this is a blind spot.

Domain expertise in an industry usually sits within the client, and is serviced to some degree by vendors.

Not all CEOs have deep domain expertise, nor do they often enough stick to one domain. Maybe that’s where a gap exists.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#185

Post by j45 »

ben_w wrote: post #174
Bombthecat wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yap. AI and agents help to centralise, not decentralise

For now. I'm expecting this to be a bubble, and that bubble to burst; when it does, whatever's the top model at that point can likely still be distilled relatively cheaply like all other models have been. That, combined with my expectations that consumer RAM prices will return to their trend and decrease in price, means that if the bubble pops in the year 20XX, whatever performance was bleeding edge at the pop, runs…

The technology of LLMs is already applicable to valuable enough problems, therefore it won’t be a bubble.

The world might be using a standard of AI needing to be a world beater to succeed but it’s simply not the case, AI a is software, and it can solve problems other software can’t.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#186

Post by j45 »

Crowberry wrote: post #136
benzible wrote: post #124

I'm CTO at a vertical SaaS company, paired with a product-focused CEO with deep domain expertise. The thesis doesn't match my experience. For one thing, the threat model assumes customers can build their own tools. Our end users can't. Their current "system" is Excel. The big enterprises that employ them have thousands of devs, but two of them explicitly cloned our product and tried to poach their own users onto it.…

I second this. Most of our customers IT department struggle to look at the responses from their failed API calls. Their systems and organisations are just too big. As it stands today; just a bit of complexity is all that is required to make AI Agents fail. I expect the gap to narrow over the years of course. But capturing complex business logic and simplifying it will probably be useful and worth paying for a long ti…

Skills seem to be promising.

I never understood the evolvement around agents, they just appeared to me as Python scripts initially (Crewai 2-3 years ago).

The question is can people see that agents will evolve? Similar to how software evolves to handle the right depth of granularity.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#187

Post by andy_ppp »

OxfordOutlander wrote: post #154
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…

I agree about boutique software, but see the development still being external - To attempt to summarize the debate, there seems to be three prevailing schools of thought: 1. Status Quo + AI. SaaS companies will adopt AI and not lose share. Everyone keeps paying for the same SaaS plus a few bells and whistles. This seems unlikely given AI makes it dramatically cheaper to build and maintain SaaS. Incumbents will save o…

I like this thoughtful and nuanced response, I think you could be right. Makes me wonder if choosing an extremely boring niche and just making several million dollars could be a good move right now.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#188

Post by jwr »

dismalpedigree wrote: post #183
jwr wrote: post #135

I am the founder of a niche SaaS ( https://partsbox.com/ — software for managing electronic parts inventory and production). While I am somewhat worried about AI capabilities, I'm not losing too much sleep over it. The worry is that customers who do not realize the full depth of the problem will implement their own app using AI. But that happens today, too: people use spreadsheets to manage their electronic parts (pl…

Not specific to PartsBox, but we use Inventree (open source similar to PartsBox) and self host it. Over the past few months we noticed certain pain points in our workflow. Rather than looking for a new tool, we used Claude Code to write some backend services and some frontend modifications. Took 2 days of tinkering. Has easily saved that much time since we implemented it. While rolling the whole solution with an AI a…

I would include this in the "spreadsheet" metaphor. I do not know your use case, so please don't take this as addressed to you specifically, but I found that there is a learning/complexity problem: many people do not realize there is much more to inventory and production management than it seems. It might seem easy to AI-code something, only to find out later that things could have been done much better.

This is actually a serious problem for me: my SaaS has a lot of very complex functionality under the hood, but it is not easily visible, and importantly it isn't necessarily appreciated when making a buying decision. Lot control is a good example: most people think it is only needed for coding batches of expiring products. In reality, it's an essential feature that pretty much everyone needs, because it lets you treat some inventory of the same part (e.g. a reel) differently from other inventory of this part (e.g. cut tape) and track those separately.

AI-coding will help people get the features they know they need, but it won't guide them to the features they don't know they could use.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#189

Post by Havoc »

benzible wrote: post #124

I'm CTO at a vertical SaaS company, paired with a product-focused CEO with deep domain expertise. The thesis doesn't match my experience. For one thing, the threat model assumes customers can build their own tools. Our end users can't. Their current "system" is Excel. The big enterprises that employ them have thousands of devs, but two of them explicitly cloned our product and tried to poach their own users onto it.…

That may well be an exception though. I'd imagine most SaaS builders are very much figuring things out as they go rather than starting with deep domain expertise

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#190

Post by cm277 »

benzible wrote: post #124

I'm CTO at a vertical SaaS company, paired with a product-focused CEO with deep domain expertise. The thesis doesn't match my experience. For one thing, the threat model assumes customers can build their own tools. Our end users can't. Their current "system" is Excel. The big enterprises that employ them have thousands of devs, but two of them explicitly cloned our product and tried to poach their own users onto it.…

Same background as you and I fully agree. Again and again you see market/economic takes from technologists. This is not a technology question (yes, LLMs work), it's an economics question: what do LLMs disrupt?

If your answer is "cost of developing code" (what TFA argues), please explain how previous waves of reducing cost of code (JVM, IDEs, post-Y2K Outsourcing) disrupted the ERP/b2b market. Oh wait, they didn't. The only real disruption in ERP in the last what 30 years, has been Cloud. Which is an economics disruption, not a technological one: cloud added complexity and points of failure and yet it still disrupted a ton of companies, because it enabled new business models (SaaS for one).

So far, the only disruption I can see coming from LLMs is middleware/integration where it could possibly simplify complexity and reduce overall costs, which if anything will help SaaS (reduction of cost of complements, classic Christensen).

Post reply on HN