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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

#381

Post by KptMarchewa »

benzible wrote: post #369
efitz wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know what you build, but I’ll share some thoughts from the other side (customer): Many SaaS products I am interested in have very little “moat”. I am interested in them not because I can’t build them, but because my limited engineering time is better spent building business specific stuff. Many products with product management teams spend a lot of their effort building functionality either to delight their hi…

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…

Most OSS is build by companies to commoditize their complement, not by some random devs building random stuff in free time.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#382

Post by lowsong »

This article seems to suggest that businesses are going to swap domain-specific SaaS tools, written and tested by people knowledgable in the domain with specific SLAs for vibe coding everything. But your AI subscription is still a SaaS?

All you've done is swapped a SaaS built for your problem domain with another, more expensive SaaS that has no support at all for your actual problem. Why would anyone want that? People buy SaaS products because they don't want to solve the problem, they just want it fixed. AI changes nothing about that.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#383

Post by kyyt »

Vibe Coding is so easy nowadays, I coded an app almost by mistake. I put a short cryptic prompt into Kim2 to see how it would respond and it immediately (and very much to my surprise), coded an entire website with the functionality I was thinking about.

It wasn't even a coherent grammatically correct sentence that I entered and it busily went to work building the site I had in mind.

It's not hard to imagine that in the next 2-3 years, anyone will be able to build personalized apps on request.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#384

Post by ardao »

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…

Microsoft PowerApps has similar workflows for at least 2 years now. The professional development experience is lacking, however enterprise users can create many applications based on Excel files.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#385

Post by latentsea »

William_BB wrote: post #379
latentsea wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I've found assigning issues to GitHub Copilot on GitHub itself to be a real step-wise change from one off requests to a chat based interface that has no awareness of my codebase. Maybe it's just me, but I'm getting significantly more realworld value out of AI these days. I've been working through doing an implementation of a spec using GitHub Copilot mostly from my phone, and it has been a really instructive exercise in how to squeeze as much out such a narrow interface as possible. I still dip into a full desktop + IDE from time to time, but for like 90% of it I've been doing it in my phone. Slowly but surely working my way from "vibe coded in a weekend" level initial AI slop quality to nice, clean architecture, excellent dev tooling, production grade multitenant SaaS. I've still got a ways to go, but I'm able to make quite a lot of progress just using my phone during my commute, on my lunch breaks, in between meetings, and bathroom breaks etc.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#386

Post by fma »

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…

Are you calling out Microsoft specifically or just in general any big tech company? Because Google can do this with Google sheets using Apps Script.

https://developers.google.com/apps-script/guides/web

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#387

Post by immibis »

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…

Reliability doesn't matter any more, there's no liability for being wrong any more.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#388

Post by emanresuymsti »

jwr wrote: post #188
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…

I would include this in the "spreadsheet" metaphor. I do not know your use case, so please don't take this as addressed to you specifically, but I found that there is a learning/complexity problem: many people do not realize there is much more to inventory and production management than it seems. It might seem easy to AI-code something, only to find out later that things could have been done much better. This is actu…

"AI-coding will help people get the features they know they need, but it won't guide them to the features they don't know they could use." Amen to this.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#389

Post by liampulles »

Teams I've worked in choose SaaS offerings based on how little expertise we have in the given domain, and the price (which includes actual monies going to the SaaS, but also the expected time of integrating with them and an expectation cost of migrating away from them).

Experienced developers have the humility to understand that there are always roadbumps and risks in building a system in a domain we do not understand, and therefore paying another company with expertise can often be worth it. Obviously some SaaS companies are better than others, which is why there is an evaluation process.

It does not surprise me (unfortunately) that proponents of using AI agents for everything minimize the value of actual lived experience in working in a given domain.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#390

Post by liampulles »

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…

You could have stopped at this article makes no sense - it couches and argues against itself to the point that it really says very little.
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