The bespoke software revolution? I'm not buying it

> Because they dont want to be the person maintaining this, so we should those people not self-hosting a free software now go one step further and also build those products?

If one thinks AI can do this eventually then it makes sense. But I feel that is impossible the predict.

> they're almost always people who already had some pull toward software

I think this is probably true, and basically how I got into software myself.

I always dabbled in writing software and things for the web, but for some reason I never thought studying computer science would be any fun and that a career as a software developer sounded boring. But then I got an actual full time office job and oh boy, did my perspective on things change fast.

That first job did not have anything to do with writing software at all. But I saw people struggle with things that seemed to me trivial to automate, such as making annotations on paper bank statements and entering them into the system line-by-line. The bookkeeping system did support electronic bank statements, but lacked features to match certain descriptions to certain cost places. In the end it was indeed faster to go the paper route... It took me a couple of hours to write something that saved hours every week and that basically kick started my software career.

Would AI have made much of a difference here? Yes, in terms of getting to the correct solution faster, but probably not in terms of who would have done that. People would still come to the person who came up with the solution to ask for maintenance and new features.

It will be race to bottom for SaaS in terms of pricing, with lots of alternatives to every SaaS.

It’s not about personal software it’s about how 1-3 people team will deliver a SaaS that actually works at scale for the 1/10th of the price.

In terms of personal software, he’s absolutely right, it’s great for hobbyist and things like in house tooling but that’s it.

You're most certainly wrong on this one. Superior models give superior products and security over time. Until every 3-6 months stops bringing a large improvement in coding capability and scaffolding, there's no reason to assume we are nearing a hard limit.

You also have to factor in that bespoke software is... bespoke. ie. much more suited to your org's use-cases than the primary solution is. Way less bloat. Way less vulnerability when you don't need an enterprise SaaS solution and instead can host on your private networks.

And as far as security considerations: Imagine you had a separate Opus 4.6 agent tasked with managing and monitoring and updating devoted to a specific slice of vulnerabilities. Of course this is highly inefficient, but it would take care of the vast majority of vulnerabilities that even enterprise SaaS have. This is simply a scaffolding issue at this point, not model ability. Scaffolding issues like this will continue to dominoe.

Competing on price was never a good strategy. Moreover, price segmentation is still a thing. You can buy Chinese Rolex knockoffs for $7, but people still buy $10k Rolex.