I stopped reading after too many references to tasks solvable by a 1-line invocation of a CLI tool like ffmpeg or pandoc.
AI agents are starting to eat SaaS
301–310 of 398 posts
Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS
#302This article made no sense to me. It is talking about AI-generated code eating SaaS. That's not what is going to replace SaaS. When AI is able to do the job itself — without generating code — that's what is going to replace SaaS. AI-generated code still requires software engineers to build, test, debug, deploy, secure, monitor, be on-call, handle incidents, and so on. That's very expensive. It is much cheaper to pay…
Note that there is zero actual sales/renewal data quoted in the article so this is all the authors vibes based on how he has been able to vibe code a few things for a team of one person to use
Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS
#303"I think we can start to see a world already where demand from new customers for certain segments of tooling and apps begins to decline. That's a problem, and will cause an increase in the sales and marketing expenditure of these companies."
I think this sort of ignores the fact that S&M agentic tools exist and the cost of those services is also dramatically decreasing, so does it net out and just become a more efficient model in general?
Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS
#304I'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.…
It's a bit surprising to me that Microsoft hasn't created a product that's "you have an Excel file in one of our cloud storage systems, here's a way for you to vibe code and host a web app whose storage is backed entirely by that file, where access control is synced to that file's access, and real-time updates propagate in both directions as if someone were editing it in native Excel on another computer. And you can eject a codebase that you, as the domain expert, can hand to a tech team to build something more broadly applicable for your organization."
Nowhere near the level of complexity that would enter your threat model. But this would be the first, minimal step towards customers building their own tools, and the fact that not even this workflow has entered the zeitgeist is... well, it's not the best news for some of the most bullish projections of AI adoption in businesses large and small.
Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS
#305Earlier 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 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…
All tech problems are actually people problems.
once the Csuite builds their own dashboards, they quickly decide what they actually need versus what is a nice to have.
Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
> 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.
Right, understood and agreed, but this was not about you and your specific skills or lack thereof; your anecdote was in support of an argument that companies would stop their SaaS because LLMs enable them to build in house.
That was your argument, right?
So in the absence of LLMs, if the company wanted to stop paying for the SaaS, would they have chosen you to do the replacement, or someone who had recent experience in the tech?
Look, we are interested in comparing the time taken to replace the SaaS with an LLM, and the time taken to replace the SaaS without LLM assistance.
That's really the only two scenarios under discussion, so lets explore those exhaustively:
1. Without LLMs: In the worst case scenario, the company had to pay for 2.5 days of employee time with the best case being 1 day of employee time. Lets go with something in-between like 1.5 days of dev time.
2. With LLMs: The company pays for 0.5 days of employee time (includes the overhead of token cost/subscription).
The difference between the only two scenarios that we have is literally a single day of employee costs!
I am skeptical that the company failed to leave the SaaS earlier because they didn't want to eat the cost of a 1.5 paid days for an employee, but a difference of a single day of cost was enough to tip the scales.
Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS
#307I'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.…
A year or two from now it will be trivial to copy your product
But what about their two year head start? If everyone is executing at the speed of light, there will still be winners and losers
Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS
#308Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. This is also why trying to add an AI agent chat into one's product is a fool's errand - the whole point of having general-purpose conversational AI is to turn the product into just another feature . It's an ugly truth product owners never wanted to hear, and are now being forced to: nobody wants software products or services . No one really wants another Widgetify of DoodlyD.oo.io or another basic software tool…
>> This is also why trying to add an AI agent chat into one's product is a fool's errand - the whole point of having general-purpose conversational AI is to turn the product into just another feature We built an AI-powered chat interface as an alternative to a fully featured search UI for a product database and it has been one of the most popular features of 2025.
Right -- and that's likely because search was completely broken, people always complained about it, and nothing was ever done to improve it.
Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS
#310I'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.…
It's a bit surprising to me that Microsoft hasn't created a product that's "you have an Excel file in one of our cloud storage systems, here's a way for you to vibe code and host a web app whose storage is backed entirely by that file, where access control is synced to that file's access, and real-time updates propagate in both directions as if someone were editing it in native Excel on another computer. And you can…
I miss MSAccess, but for the modern age. It has been replaced by basic CRUD using your platform of choice, but it's not as easy.
That would be similar to your solution, so either one would work.
I think that there might be some similar alternatives (maybe Airtable? probably using Lovable or Firebase counts) but nothing that is available for me for now.