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AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

martinalderson.com

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Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#251

Post by linsomniac »

lelanthran wrote: post #138
linsomniac wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We just had a $240/year renewal for teamretro.com come due, and while TeamRetro has a lot of components, we are only using the retro and ice breaker components. So I gave Claude Code a couple of prompts and I now have a couple static HTML pages that do the ice breaker (using local storage) and the retro (using a Google sheet as the storage backend, largely because it mimics our pre-teamretro process). It took me no m…

> It took me no more than 2 hours to put those together. We didn't renew our TeamRetro Okay, so two hours with an LLM vs maybe 2.5 days without an LLM in the best-case scenario (i.e. LLMs gave you a 10x boost. I would expect it to be less than that though, like maybe a 2x boost) - it sounds like it was always pretty cheap to replace the SaaS, but the business didn't do it. TBH, the arguments were never "It would take…

>.e. LLMs gave you a 10x boost. I would expect it to be less than that though, like maybe a 2x boost

I'm not a frontend guy, I'm an operations guy that sometimes does some backends. So it's likely a solid 2.5 days for me to build the pair of these, probably more I haven't touched Javascript in over a decade.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#252

Post by dboreham »

CyanLite2 wrote: post #228

It was common in the early 2000s for big companies to have large internal IT teams to build "line of business" apps. Then SaaS came along and delivered LoB apps for a fraction of the price and with a monthly subscription. Looks like we're headed back to the internal IT days of building customized LoB apps.

Or perhaps there will arise a new kind of external service provider that delivers customized SaaS services to those same users, using AI. There's no reason the work has to go back to the internal IT people who were fired long ago.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#253

Post by biql »

There are already plenty of SaaS that offer open source version as a way to push to the cloud and charge for hosting, maintenance, support and some extra features. In that way, a working code have already been commoditized and those companies didn't disappear.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#254

Post by agentultra »

ethbr1 wrote: post #215
cm277 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Th…

I'll take a crack. > 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. "Cost of developing code" is a trivial and incomplete answer. Coding LLMs disrupt (or will, in…

This seems to assume that these non-technical people have the expertise to evaluate LLM/agent generated solutions.

The problem of this tooling is that it cannot deploy code on its own. It needs a human to take the fall when it generates errors that lose people money, break laws, cause harm, etc. Humans are supposed to be reviewing all of the code before it goes out but you’re assumption is that people without the skills to read code let alone deploy and run it are going to do it with agents without a human in the loop.

All those non-technical users have to do is approve that app, manage to deploy and run it themselves somehow, and wait for the security breach to lose their jobs.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#255

Post by chrisweekly »

igortg wrote: post #209
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.…

The beauty of HN: frequently comments are way more valuable than the article being shared

Agreed. I've been on HN for 15 years, and IME maybe 90% of the value has come directly from comments (another 5% from links in commenters' profiles, and 5% from TFAs).

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#257

Post by cdurth »

testbjjl wrote: post #234
jeswin wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For one thing, the threat model assumes customers can build their own tools. That's not the threat model. The threat model is that they won't have to - at some point which may not be right now. End users want to get their work done, not learn UIs and new products. If they can get their analysis/reports based on excels which are already on SharePoint (or wherever), they'd want just that. You can already see this hap…

The Excel holy grail. Dashboard are an abstraction, SaaS is an abstraction of an abstraction from the pov of customers suffering from a one size fits all. Shell scripts generated by LLMs that send automated a customized reports via email will make a lot of corporate heros. No need to login, learn and use the SaaS in many instances for decisions makers.

I feel that large corps have guard rails that will limit this from happening. For SMB's, this is not a new problem. Gritty IT guys have been doing this for decades. I inherit these bootstrapped reporting systems all the time. The issue is when that person leaves, it is no longer maintainable. I've yet to come across a customer who has had any sort of usable documentation. The process then repeats itself when I take over, and presumably when I'm finished. With a SaaS product, you are at least paying for some support and visibility of the processes. I'm not really trying to make a point other than this is not a new, but still intriguing problem, and not sure that LLMs will be some god answer, as the organizations have trouble determining what they even need.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#258

Post by ethbr1 »

agentultra wrote: post #254
ethbr1 wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll take a crack. > 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. "Cost of developing code" is a trivial and incomplete answer. Coding LLMs disrupt (or will, in…

This seems to assume that these non-technical people have the expertise to evaluate LLM/agent generated solutions. The problem of this tooling is that it cannot deploy code on its own. It needs a human to take the fall when it generates errors that lose people money, break laws, cause harm, etc. Humans are supposed to be reviewing all of the code before it goes out but you’re assumption is that people without the ski…

I think you're underestimating (1) how bad most B2B is (from a bug and security vulnerability perspective) & (2) how little B2B companies' engineers understand about how their customers are using their products.

The frequency of mind-bogglingly stupid 1+1=3 errors (where 1+1 is a specific well-known problem in a business domain and 3 is the known answer) cuts against your 'professional SaaS can do it better' argument.

And to be clear: I'm talking about 'outsourced dev to lowest-cost resources' B2B SaaS, not 'have a team of shit-hot developers' SaaS.

The former of which, sadly, comprises the bulk of the industry. Especially after PE acquisition of products.

Furthermore, I'm not convinced that coding LLMs + scanning aren't capable of surpassing the average developer in code security. Especially since it's a brute force problem: 'ensure there's no gap by meticulously checking each of 500 things.'

Auto code scanning for security hasn't been a significant area of investment because the benefits are nebulous. If you already must have human developers writing code, then why not have them also review it?

In contrast, scanning being a requirement to enabling fast-path citizen-developer LLM app creation changes the value proposition (and thus incentive to build good, quality products).

It's been mentioned in other threads, but Fire/Supabase-style 'bolt-on security-critical components' is the short term solution I'd expect to evolve. There's no reason from-scratch auth / object storage / RBAC needs to be built most of the time.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#259

Post by wouldbecouldbe »

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.…

Yeah I think the real values is for the Solo developers, indie hackers & side projects.

Being unrestrained by team protocols, communications, jira boards, product owners, grumpy seniors.

They can now deliver much more mature platforms, apps, consumer platforms without any form of funding. You can easily save months on the basics like multi tenant set up, tests, payment integration, mailing settings, etc.

It does seem likely that the software space is about to get even crowdier, but also much more feature rich.

There is of course also a wide array of dreamers & visionairies who know jump into the developer role. Wether or not they are able to fully run their own platform im not sure. I did see many posts asking for help at some point.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#260

Post by hobs »

hrimfaxi wrote: post #220
adriand wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The president of a company I work with is a youngish guy who has no technical skills, but is resourceful. He wanted updated analytic dashboards, but there’s no dev capacity for that right now. So he decided he was going to try his hand at building his own dashboard using Lovable, which is one of these AI app making outfits. I sent him a copy of the dev database and a few markdown files with explanations regarding cer…

At a certain scale the CEO's time is likely better spent dictating the dashboard they want rather than implementing it themselves. But I guess to your point, the future may allow for the dictation to be the creation.

Agree, as engineers we should be making the car easier to operate instead of making everyone a mechanic.

Focus on the simple iteration loop of "why is it so hard to understand things about our product?" maybe you cant fix it all today but climb that hill more instead of make your CEO spend some sleepless nights on a thing that you could probably build in 1/10th the time.

If you want to be a successful startup saas sw eng then engaging with the current and common business cases and being able to predict the standard cache of problems they're going to want solved turns you from "a guy" to "the guy".

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