Why software stocks are getting pummelled • Hacker News Board

Re: Why software stocks are getting pummelled

#281

Post by ashrotyne » Wed, Feb 04, 2026, 6:00 PM UTC

bagacrap wrote: post #277

AstroBen wrote: post #168

If I were confident it were AI as the cause I'd be seriously tempted to buy right now Take Adobe for example: they're getting pummeled and there's no way it's due to AI No-one's building an in-house Photoshop clone to replace them AI also isn't letting any competitors in. Geez if it were as easy as cloning their product you'd have a mile high mountain of VC money to fund it even pre-AI Code has never been much of a b…

Do you have a theory what the cause is then? The market moves and pundits write a story to match. There is no telling whether it's right or wrong.

The gate opens. The gate closes. It does not "help".

Re: Why software stocks are getting pummelled

#282

Post by manmal » Wed, Feb 04, 2026, 9:49 PM UTC

9rx wrote: post #127

manmal wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such black and white thinking. Even the little tools fall apart at first sight of an edge case if they are fully vibed. Neither Opus nor codex are good at architecture, and it’s not clear they ever will be.

You still seem to be thinking about code in the traditional sense. A lot of the software I am using now in my non-tech business isn't rooted in code at all. It is simply asking an LLM to carry out a task. Still programming, of course, but not with a traditional programming language. The LLM will produce the excepted results in realtime. The intermediary step of building an executable is totally unnecessary. In the ol…

Yeah let’s talk again in 6 months when the slop catches up with you.

Re: Why software stocks are getting pummelled

#283

Post by 9rx » Thu, Feb 05, 2026, 9:05 AM UTC

manmal wrote: post #282

9rx wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You still seem to be thinking about code in the traditional sense. A lot of the software I am using now in my non-tech business isn't rooted in code at all. It is simply asking an LLM to carry out a task. Still programming, of course, but not with a traditional programming language. The LLM will produce the excepted results in realtime. The intermediary step of building an executable is totally unnecessary. In the ol…

Yeah let’s talk again in 6 months when the slop catches up with you.

Been using it for several years. What is going to change in six months?

Re: Why software stocks are getting pummelled

#284

Post by assaddayinh » Thu, Feb 05, 2026, 1:59 PM UTC

lateforwork wrote: post #6

> The fear is that these [AI] tools are allowing companies to create much of the software they need themselves. AI-generated code still requires software engineers to build, test, debug, deploy, secure, monitor, be on-call, support, handle incidents, and so on. That's very expensive. It is much cheaper to pay a small monthly fee to a SaaS company.

Its much cheaper yo devalue the software company via ai hype buy the buisness qnd the integrate the solution behind an ai layer. Aka as the uber proposition. Our taxitokens just got degilded!

Re: Why software stocks are getting pummelled

#285

Post by Maro » Wed, Feb 11, 2026, 6:04 PM UTC

marcus_holmes wrote: post #190

falloutx wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone says that but I don't see anyone cooking up the next photoshop and selling it at $3/month. Why are we not seeing more options of every tool? Most Saas companies are sales companies at their core rather than software companies. And those sales people are so good that they can sell a todo list for millions.

> I don't see anyone cooking up the next photoshop and selling it at $3/month. That's not the situation we're talking about though. It's someone saying "hmm, I need to edit this picture. Can I get ChatGPT to do it?" where 3 years ago they would have had to buy Photoshop and learn how to use it. Similarly, if they need a tool to batch-convert a thousand images, they're getting an LLM to construct the specific tool the…

> where 3 years ago they would have had to buy Photoshop and learn how to use it

This seems to imply that a significant fraction of Adobe revenues is from private individuals who pay monthly fees just to occasionally do image edits with Photoshop and similar tools.

I don't think that's true.