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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

#321

Post by bccdee »

jdthedisciple wrote: post #125
lateforwork wrote: post #87

This 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…

Perhaps OP's argument still applies to dev-oriented SaaS. Are you as a dev still going to pay for analytics and dashboards that you could have propped up by Claude in 5 minutes instead?

The value proposition of SaaS is ultimately just that it's not a hack.

Most SaaS products could be replaced by a form + spreadsheet + email workflow, and the reason they aren't is that people don't want to be dealing with a hacky solution. Devs can hack together a nice little webapp instead of a network of spreadsheets, but it's still a hack. Factoring in AI assistance, perhaps SaaS is now competing with "something I hacked together in a week" as opposed to "something I hacked together in a month," but it's a hack either way.

I am absolutely going to pay for analytics and dashboards, because I don't want the operational concerns of my Elasticsearch analytics cluster getting in the way of the alarm that goes off when my primary database catches fire. Ops visibility is too important to be a hack, regardless of how quickly I could implement that hack.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#322

Post by SoftTalker »

hobs wrote: post #260
hrimfaxi wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Most engineers like being mechanics though.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#323

Post by adriand »

ceejayoz wrote: post #313
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…

> No updates yet, but I have every confidence he’ll figure it out. "It" being "that it's harder than it looks"?

> "It" being "that it's harder than it looks"?

Honestly, I'm not sure what to expect. There are clearly things he can't do (e.g. to make it work in prod, it needs to be in our environment, etc. etc.) but I wouldn't be at all surprised if he makes great headway. When he first asked me about it, I started typing out all the reasons it was a bad idea - and then I paused and thought, you know, I'm not here to put barriers in his path.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#324

Post by tovej »

rglover wrote: post #263
tovej wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do feel this divide, but from what I've read, and ehat I've observed, it's more a divide between people who understand the limited use-cases where machine learning is useful, and people who believe it should be used wherever possible. For software engineering, it is useless unless you're writing snippets that already exist in the LLMs corpus.

> For software engineering, it is useless unless you're writing snippets that already exist in the LLMs corpus. If I give something like Sonnet the docs for my JS framework, it can write code "in it" just fine. It makes the occasional mistake, but if I provide proper context and planning up front, it can knock out some fairly impressive stuff (e.g., helping me to wire up a shipping/logistics dashboard for a new ecom…

If you need a shipping dashboard, then yeah, that's a very common, very simple use-case. Just hook up an API to a UI. Even then I don't think you'll make a very maintainable app that way, especially if you have multiple views (because the LLMs are not consistent in how they use features, they're always generating from scratch and matching whatever's closest).

What I'm saying is that whenever you need to actually do some software design, i.e. tackle a novel problem, they are useless.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#325

Post by joshstrange »

In my experience, AI/Vibe-coded tools crumble under their own weight given enough iterations and even faster if there is no (real) developer in the loop overseeing/planning/reviewing.

I think that _developers_ might be reaching for more LLM-built tools instead of SaaS in some cases and I also can believe that plenty of people _think_ they are vibe-coding up alternatives to SaaSes they pay for but I think those people are going to have a bad time when it eventually collapses (the tool they made, not talking about the AI bubble).

I'm not anti-LLM (not in the slightest) and you can sometimes (it's not a given) get to 80-90% of an existing product/service with vibe-coding or LLM-assisted development but that last 10-20% (and especially that last 1-5%) are where it gets hard. Really hard.

It's the typical "you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially"-mentality IMHO. I feel this myself all the time, even before LLMs, "Oh, I could clone this easily!" and in many cases I could or even did... or at least I cloned the easy/basic/happy-path version that eschewed a whole slew of features I didn't need/care for. But then the complexity started to set in. [0]

I have the same feeling for things I'm not even trying to clone, just build from scratch. I put together a cookbook for friends and family recently and used LLMs to help write essentially a static site generator to read my JSON data I created (some with the help of LLMs) and render it out as HTML (which I then turned into a PDF). My mind started to run with "Hmm, could I create a product out of this? It was relatively easy to get started..." but then reality set in and I remembered all the little tweaks I had to do (shorten a title here, reduce padding there, etc to make everything fit and look good). Sure, I got 80% of the way there in the first or second iteration of it using LLMs but there was plenty of massaging that had to happen to turn it into something usable that I could send to a printer.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#326

Post by SoftTalker »

cdurth wrote: post #257
testbjjl wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

Yes, back in the heyday of Visual Basic (mid-1990s) we had one business analyst who learned enough to build dashboard-like apps with charts and graphs and parameters and filters. He was quick at it and because it was outside of IT there was little in the way of process or guardrails to slow him down. Users loved what he did, but when he left there was nobody else who knew anything about it.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#327

Post by dismalpedigree »

solaire_oa wrote: post #286
dismalpedigree wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not specific to PartsBox, but we use Inventree (open source similar to PartsBox) and self host it. Over the past few months we noticed certain pain points in our workflow. Rather than looking for a new tool, we used Claude Code to write some backend services and some frontend modifications. Took 2 days of tinkering. Has easily saved that much time since we implemented it. While rolling the whole solution with an AI a…

First, I'll second that I've applied agentic LLMs to an open source project to fix bugs and forcibly coerce it to act in ways that the maintainer may or may not approve of. It has been remarkablely effective, so long as I'm willing to apply patches or maintain a fork of the project (trivial, since this particular open-source project is abandoned anyway). That said, the act of doing this- using LLMs to dominate somebo…

I support Inventree. Even have raised PRs. Im specifically referring to things that are custom to our workflow.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#328

Post by dismalpedigree »

LunaSea wrote: post #282
dismalpedigree wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not specific to PartsBox, but we use Inventree (open source similar to PartsBox) and self host it. Over the past few months we noticed certain pain points in our workflow. Rather than looking for a new tool, we used Claude Code to write some backend services and some frontend modifications. Took 2 days of tinkering. Has easily saved that much time since we implemented it. While rolling the whole solution with an AI a…

Won't this breakdown if you need to pull new changes from the original project?

No. Written against the documented APIs and extension points.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#329

Post by SoftTalker »

mlinhares wrote: post #274
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.…

I'm going to predict there will be a movement into "build it in house with LLMs", these things are going to be expensive, they are going to fail to deliver or be updated and there will be a huge bounce back. The cost of writing software is very small, the cost of running and scaling it is there the money is and these people can't have their own IT teams rebuilding and maintaining all this stuff form scratch. A lot of…

I think there's a good chance. These things happen in cycles. A few decades ago it was common for companies to have in-house software development using something like COBOL or maybe BASIC (and at that time, sofware development was a cost-center job, it paid OK but nothing like what it does today). Then there was a push for COTS (commercial of-the-shelf) software. Then the internet made SaaS possible and that got hot. Developer salaries exploded. Now LLMs have people saying "just do it in house" again. Lessons are forgotten and have to be re-learned.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#330

Post by bccdee »

jdthedisciple wrote: post #140
rhubarbtree wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, because then I know the code is properly engineering, tested, maintained and supported. Generating code is one part of software engineering is a small part of SaaS.

I'd love for SaaS to stay thriving but the flip side is simply the harsh reality that my own second thought these days is immediately "how easily will an agent replace my idea? yea probably quite easily..."

Ideas were never worth much. Implementing a quick prototype was always pretty simple. How easy is it, with modern tooling, to build a collaborative web editor? Just slap together prosemirror and automerge and you're already there. Still, nobody has displaced Google Docs.
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