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Malleable Software
41–50 of 100 posts
Re: Malleable Software
#42I've experienced this partially, as someone who never uses sheets etc - the capability to create a template that achieves my exact needs within a few seconds is really strong - i can then form malleability in where I want.
But quite honestly, the SaaS world is also due a culling - i'd argue if the software you work on as a SaaS business is replaceable by a malleable piece of AI software, you're closer to Pets.Com than a suitable business model.
Re: Malleable Software
#43So we need to create tools with very high flexibility, not-so-fantastic onboarding that take a long time to setup and hard to get right - so that AI can fix them? I would rather use Linear (as per example).
Re: Malleable Software
#44the guy is full of sh*t, his example makes zero sense and looks like badly edited output of creative writing prompt. Not to mention he is the ceo of Fibery so whole thing is just a promotion.
Re: Malleable Software
#45Yes and no.
Malleability is opposed to institution. When everything is hyper malleable everybody will need to be trained and change management will take up a large proportion of time.
The main reason why a lot of people go with Jira is not quality of the software - but the institutional buy-in. Employees, current and prospect, know how to work with the tool.
The greater change is likely labor disruption.
Re: Malleable Software
#46It does seem likely that there is a shift towards DIY single use tools.
For anything more than single use there is a bit of a risk of it turning into a mess that collapses under it's own weight. A bit like a couple bad decisions at the start of a coding project comes back to haunt you later. So I struggle to see this replacing core infrastructure of anything in long run.
Re: Malleable Software
#47Inflexibility is the quality I desire more and more as I get older. I don't want to force my software to do dumb shit, I want my software to force me into avoiding dumb shit. This is how you keep a system understandable. That quality is far more precious than the ability to connect complicated enterprise spaghetti machines into each other.
Stability is something that I also desire more and more. Take my digital clock: I put some AA battery in it, adjust the time, and the only thing I do is look at it (its purpose) for the next months or year. I want my computer to be like that. No surprise when updating.
Re: Malleable Software
#48A lot of people been saying this lately, that LLMs are going to make SaaS obsolete because you will be able to build the alternative yourself without the need to pay. But (and I'll copy & paste a comment I wrote a few days ago) I disagree. This existed way before LLM. Open source alternatives to most products are already available. And install them and deploy them is much easier than do it with LLMs, and you get upda…
Counter argument: people want simple systems that are easy to update, secure, deploy etc. I've been burned so many times by being an early adopter of a simple product for it to add too many features and shifting focus along the way, leaving the early adopters as second class users. This usually happens because investors wants a return on their investment by enshittifying the product. As self hosting with Docker and g…
What percentage of companies do you think have the technical know how to even fire up their own cloud application and database instance even with all the LLM assistance in the world? Outside of companies in the software space and some of the largest orgs, I’m gonna guess maybe 20%?
Re: Malleable Software
#49I see some of this, from the point of view that it's going to be cheaper to create bespoke solutions for problems. And perhaps a "neoSaaS" company is one that, from a very bare bones idea, can create your own implementation. But, at the same time, there are two issues: - Companies can be really complex. The "create a system and parametrise it" idea has been done before, and those parametrisation processes are pretty…
> The best software around is the one that's opinionated.
This. And it isn't going to change.
The post avoids trying to answer "Why are opinionated tools popular and effective?"
The answer is that a standardized process that they encourage is often more efficient than whatever bullshit {random company} came up with in-house.
Malleable software needs to produce two equivalently good outcomes to beat opinionated:
1. Improve the underlying process at the customer's business (in terms of effectiveness)
2. Avoid a customization maintenance burden
The seductiveness of "just for you" bespoke solutions is they avoid (1) by telling the customer what they want to hear: you're so brilliant, your process is actually better, our product is a custom fit for your exact process, etc. That's bullshit -- a lot of customer processes are half-baked dumpster fires, and their companies would be better served by following standards.
To (2), I am incredibly skeptical on the long-term tech debt that malleable solutions will impose. What happens when there's a bug in the version only you use? Is that going to be the vendor's priority? Oh, you're supposed to fix it yourself? Congrats... we've just added a requirement that these tools are capable of making random mid-level in-house practitioners as competent as focused dev teams. That's a tall order.
Exhibit A that I'd want a follow-up post to address: SAP.
The above are the reason they realized they were trending in the wrong direction and have been dragging their customer base back to Clean Core.
Walk me through how malleable software would work better for SAP as a product, and I'll begin to believe...
Re: Malleable Software
#50I'm not sure about software that sells itself on providing a mirror for people to reflect on the structure they use for organization, but I do believe eventually the tools that are going to win are those that do text interface.
Even a visual tool like blender should expose their full GUI as a text API. It needs a bit of adapting, specifically for domain-specific structs (which should be retrievable via calls like 'select-bb' or 'select-coordinates'), but after that's done it's a game changer.
That class of software has a lot of proprietary GUI's that look slick and people are familiar with, but who cares about familiar in a world where the other software lets me point my LLM at its help file and build me whatever gui/tui/script/voice integration I can think of.