There was no chance that everyone would be running their own email server, but if it wasn't for the lack of IPv6 adaptation a plug and go home email server solution would probably see a decent amount of use. I'd bet we'd already be seeing it as a feature in most mid-ranged home routers by now.
The mail server in a router is easy to host, the problem is: 1) Uptime (though this could be partially alleviated by retries) and most of all: 2) "Trust"/"Spam score" It's the main reason to use Sendgrid, AWS, Google, etc. Their "value" is not the email service, it's that their SMTP servers are trusted. If tomorrow I can just send from localhost instead of going through Google it's fine for me, but in reality, my ema…
3) Upgrades suck. Admin also sucks
Maintenance is probably my number one reason for giving up on projects where I'm responsible for feeding the pet.
I'd actually say the opposite is the case. B2B (even SaaS) is probably the most robust when it comes to AI resistance. The described "in house vibe coded SaaS replacement" does not mirror my experience in B2B at all. The B2B software mindset I've encountered the most is "We'll pay you so we don't have to wrestle with this and can focus on what we do. We'll pay you even more if we worry even less." which is basically…
The reality is anyone generate useful code with an AI agent now. Dores in accounting can now automate all her spreadsheets in a single afternoon. Not trying to hype AI, but we are in an interesting transitional period.
The accounting saas dores presumably uses doesn't "automate spreadsheets" as its core value prop.
related: i'm thinking these vibe coded solutions are revealing to everyone how important and under appreciated good UX is when it comes to implicit education of any given thing. Like given this complex process, the UX is holding your hand while educating you through a workflow. this stuff is part of software engineering yet it isn't "code".
It's a tale as old as time that developers, particularly junior developers, are convinced they could "slap together something in one weekend" that would replace expensive SAAS software and "just do the parts of it we actually use". Unfortunately, the same arguments against those devs regular-coding a bespoke replacement apply to them vibe-coding a bespoke replacement: management simply doesn't want to be responsible…
what if this time it's senior developers and they actually can slap something together better then the expensive SAAS offerings? what if the expensive SAAS offering is just as vibe coded and poor quality as what a junior offers?
To the first question, if your senior devs can do that there's almost certainly something more directly valuable to your business they could be doing than solving a problem your vendor has already solved
The second question is a valid one, and I think it will somewhat raise the bar of what successful SAAS vendors will have to offer in coming years
It's a tale as old as time that developers, particularly junior developers, are convinced they could "slap together something in one weekend" that would replace expensive SAAS software and "just do the parts of it we actually use". Unfortunately, the same arguments against those devs regular-coding a bespoke replacement apply to them vibe-coding a bespoke replacement: management simply doesn't want to be responsible…
So you think this downturn will be short lived? When management realise that the vibe coded projects are not maintainable, SAAS will be as popular as ever
It seems that current advantages would compound with AI. I.e., if I am making a SaaS for Popsicle stick makers today, why I am disadvantaged with AI vs a new competitor in the space? I guess the hypothesis is the Popsicle stick maker will vibe code all of the software that they need instead. For that, we need significantly better AI than we have today - perhaps something like a 1000X improvement. Basically, this is a world in which non-technical grandparents can vibe code anything that they want. This means, it understands what you want without you being able to articulate it well in the first place.
I'd actually say the opposite is the case. B2B (even SaaS) is probably the most robust when it comes to AI resistance. The described "in house vibe coded SaaS replacement" does not mirror my experience in B2B at all. The B2B software mindset I've encountered the most is "We'll pay you so we don't have to wrestle with this and can focus on what we do. We'll pay you even more if we worry even less." which is basically…
For big corporations at least prices of SaaS are rarely an issue. Issues are: we don’t have the time to introduce a new tool, what about our processes, we don’t have the right people.
> we want recent examples just look at tailwindui since it's technically a SaaS. This is a terrible example. Show me someone ripping out their SAP ERP or SalesForce CRM system where they're paying $100k+ for a vibe coded alternative and I'll believe this overall sentiment.
These examples are going to be lagging indicators of the underlying sentiment. Just because it cannot be done today, doesn't mean there is not a real appetite in large enterprises to do exactly this. Without naming names, I know of at least one public company with a real hunger for exactly this eventuality.
I too have an appetite for magic beans, but unfortunately, I'll be unable to eat them until they exist. As it stands now, it doesn't seem like AI stuff can produce anything with this large a scope.
I'd actually say the opposite is the case. B2B (even SaaS) is probably the most robust when it comes to AI resistance. The described "in house vibe coded SaaS replacement" does not mirror my experience in B2B at all. The B2B software mindset I've encountered the most is "We'll pay you so we don't have to wrestle with this and can focus on what we do. We'll pay you even more if we worry even less." which is basically…
I, on the other hand, can't wait to fire every single B2B subscription we've got. B2B SaaS is a VULN. They get bought out, raise prices, fail. And then you have extremely large amounts of unplanned spend and engineering to get around them. I remember when we replaced the feature flags and metrics dashboards with SignalFX and LaunchDarkly. Both of those went sour. SignalFx got bought out and quadrupled their insane pr…
> And then you have extremely large amounts of unplanned spend and engineering to get around them
You get the same shocks with internal teams, just from other causes. And you have to manage them.
I'm sure you've only ever seen brilliant software created by internal software teams?
Having participated in the build of an inventory system / system of record for a large national retail company, I can't see vibe coding helping anything more than the prototyping in the discovery / requirements gathering parts of the process. The sheer volume of data, the need for real time consistency in store locations, yada yada means that bad early decisions bite hard down the road. Lots of drudge work can be ass…
The example I made about inventory wasn't random. One of my clients spends 500k+ on XXX licensing per year (for a 200M revenue company that's not peanuts), and on top of that has to employ 12 full time XXX developers (that command high figures just for their expertise on that software while providing very little productivity) and every single feature takes months to develop anyway. Talking about stuff like adding few…
That situation makes sense but then i have to ask why hasn't it been done already? Software developers are not rare and if the use case is so isolated and discreet then surely it would have been tried by now. Even without genAI, CRUD, RDBMS record management, SSO, row level security... none of those things are new or out of reach until now. I think what you'll find is when you sit down with the users and start asking about the parts of the exiting system they actually need you'll never get agreement nor a clear answer. When/if you finally get a set of requirements and after UAT sign-off and then after go-live the users will say "this isn't what i meant" and you're back to square one. Rinse/repeat for years and then one day an exec will say "why are we wasting all this time, let's just subscribe to an OTS saas and make them configure it to meet our needs".
1. This isn't rooted in data but anecdotes "One Series E CEO told me that they’re re-evaluating the quarterly renewal of their engineering productivity software because they along with an engineer reimplemented something using Github and Notion APIs. They were paying $30,000 to a popular tool3 and they were not going to renew anymore." 2. These anecdotes are about tech startups spend, not your . Nor or they grounded…
Yeah, also if a SaaS costs, 10k a year, I promise its not not more cost effecient to pull your 10k a month engineer off their usual work to build and then maintain some vibe coded slope everytime an edge case occurs. Also many customers of SaaS have little to zero engineering staff, they are in construction, resturaunts, law offices ect. These takes are so assanine.
Even in companies that have SWE, do you really want to divert in-house SWE time to something as exciting as ... accounting rules and making sure your inventory is auditable? Or any number of the weird compliance things associated with most B2B software for a medium-size business?
It's a tale as old as time that developers, particularly junior developers, are convinced they could "slap together something in one weekend" that would replace expensive SAAS software and "just do the parts of it we actually use". Unfortunately, the same arguments against those devs regular-coding a bespoke replacement apply to them vibe-coding a bespoke replacement: management simply doesn't want to be responsible…
sorry, what do you mean?
If software already exists that does X, X is a solved problem. You didn't hire a developer to solve already-solved problems.