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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

#371

Post by benzible »

efitz wrote: post #370
benzible wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The OSS point doesn't apply to every vertical. Open source applications come about when developers scratch their own itch. Developer tools, infrastructure, general purpose CRMs, project management get OSS alternatives because developers use them and want to build them. Nobody is building open source software for [niche professional vertical] in their spare time. It's not mass market. It's not something a developer en…

> Nobody is building open source software for [niche professional vertical] in their spare time. As a matter of fact, I am (in the computer security vertical) - look for an announcement on Hacker News at the beginning of the year. I suspect that others are too, but there's always a discoverability problem for niche tools in verticals that one doesn't participate in, e.g. I know nothing about software for dentists but…

[niche professional vertical] in my response was a stand-in for the specific vertical my startup targets, which is light years from computer security. Computer security is a vertical where the practitioners are often developers or developer-adjacent. You're building tools for people like yourself. That's exactly the "scratch your own itch" dynamic I'm describing.

The vertical I'm in has zero overlap with the developer population. The end users aren't technical, don't participate on HN, and aren't going to "manage an agentic coding project." There's no equivalent of a developer who moonlights on OSS tooling because they're passionate about the problem space, because the problem space requires domain expertise that developers have no reason to acquire.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#372

Post by linsomniac »

lelanthran wrote: post #306
linsomniac wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>.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 b…

>That was your argument, right?

I wasn't intending to make an argument, I was specifically replying to:

>does not mention a single specific SaaS subscription he’s cancelled

I was imagining it could start a thread of examples where it's happened.

>would they have chosen you to do the replacement, or someone who had recent experience in the tech?

I get what you're saying, but those aren't the only two options; they very likely would have chosen neither of those options. The resources we had available was an ops guy who is pretty handy with the LLMs.

I get the point you're making, I really do. My counterpoint is that there are some SaaSes out there that people can build replacements for by using the LLMs at no incremental cost.

>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

Sure, I'd be skeptical about it when put that way as well. That's not how it played out however: We were having a retro and the guy running it said that our subscription was expiring the end of the month and wanted discussion about whether we wanted to purchase it for another year. 2 weeks later, before our next retro, I threw a prompt at Claude Code and asked a couple people to try out the result, incorporated their feedback and we ran the retro on it. We aren't planning to renew.

This was not something "the company" had a big discussion about; my boss made an offhand comment about it, and I did it as a side project while I was doing something else.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#373

Post by re-thc »

InvertedRhodium wrote: post #175
re-thc wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do you/I know that? I implemented OpenTelemetry in a project of mine recently and was shocked to see the number of AI authored commits Do you pay for OpenTelemetry? How is this related?

If I did, I likely wouldn't have access to the source code and wouldn't be able to verify the degree of AI input. So, I ask again - how do you know that the service you're paying for is all of those things?

> So, I ask again - how do you know that the service you're paying for is all of those things?

How do you know anything? How do you know the bank won't lose your money? How do you know the bank note you hold is worth what it says? How do you know?

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#374

Post by j45 »

btown wrote: post #304
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.…

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…

It’s possible to do this with excel cia azure or even tying it into power bi first.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#375

Post by rewgs »

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.…

> Their current "system" is Excel.

> The bottleneck is still knowing what to build, not building.

I'd amend this to "the bottleneck is being _interested_ in building."

The piece that is _constantly_ missing from AI discourse is that no amount of "breaking down barriers" will result in people who aren't interested in building, building.

I really think that it's as simple as that. Most either don't have the wherewithal or the interest to try and build something beyond the tools that are currently at their disposal -- they're just trying to complete a task, not build the tool that enables them to complete the task; the few that do become programmers. Thus, you have untold instances where "their 'system' is Excel," and programmers selling them solutions to replace it.

It's not intelligence, it's not knowledge, it's not even really aptitude. It's interest.

Another example of this is the reaction to more "creativity-focused" AI models: you see people acting like they've been gate-kept by having to know _how_ to do a thing in order to _do_ a thing, which is somehow this great injustice and AI has finally leveled the playing field so they can finally show those snooty artists who's boss (this attitude is _all over_ places like /r/aiwars). But the reality is that these people simply are not interested enough in music/photography/whatever to learn it, and will largely remain uninterested in the field once this moment is normalized and we get used to the new position of the goalposts. They don't like _creating_, they like _having created_ and whatever social cache they mistakenly believe comes with it (which explains their near-hatred of artists -- they are, very simply, jealous).

These dynamics also explain why no-code tools don't seem to ever stick. Building something requires that the person doing the building be interested in building, but people who are interested in building will have already learned to build in some form or fashion, or at least can easily see the shortcomings with tools that ultimately take away their agency to build and/or their participation in the process (which, for many -- including myself -- is kind of the whole point: I love the process!)

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#377

Post by karmasimida »

Saas is going to chipping away.

Agents offer a very attractive level of abstraction, and its customers, aren't necessarily human: it could be other agents. Many saas we have today would simply be unnecessary in the future.

If 90% of the actual work is waiting for Agent to get the work done, why would those companies keep paying those saas companies license fee per seat? It doesn't make sense.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#378

Post by William_BB »

nlake906 wrote: post #243
William_BB wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue it's not CEOs job to code his own dashboards... This sounds like a vibe coding side project. And I'm sorry, but whatever he builds will most likely become tech debt that has to be rewritten at some point.

Or to steel-man it, it could also end up as a prototype that forced the end user to deal with decision points, and can serve as a framework for a much more specific requirements discussion.

That's a good point

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#379

Post by William_BB »

latentsea wrote: post #265
Bridged7756 wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes friend. That's what people said 2 years ago. Next?

There's been an obvious step change on the coding front from 2 years ago, and it feels obvious to me there's going to be another. The difference now is the people working on systems to clone SaaS at scale are likely starting to put real effort, sustained effort into now that agents are good enough to accomplish subsets of it, can be improved much further with the right techniques and orchestration, and themselves wil…

Personally, hard disagree. There were improvements, yes, but the last year felt particularly stagnant to me

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#380

Post by bartread »

ImPleadThe5th wrote: post #364
btown wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Probably because Microsoft knows vibe coding is _not_ an actual viable way to build production ready code and does not want to deal with the liability issues of prompting customers to move from a working Excel sheet to a broken piece of software that looks like it works. In my experience, it's actually quite hard to move a business from an excel sheet to software. Because an excel sheet allows the end user to easily…

> Probably because Microsoft knows vibe coding is _not_ an actual viable way to build production ready code and does not want to deal with the liability issues of prompting customers to move from a working Excel sheet to a broken piece of software that looks like it works.

Whilst you could plausibly argue that Microsoft have spent the past 25 years attempting to stamp them out, this is exactly what VB6 and VBA were.

People built whole businesses on/around these technologies, and people liked them because you could get something working fast. As maligned as they are nowadays they were so widely used because they delivered value.

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