Strongly agree. Personal software is also personal responsibility. It’s fun to dream up features, much less fun to be responsible for their implementation and maintenance.
The bespoke software revolution? I'm not buying it
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Re: The bespoke software revolution? I'm not buying it
#42I vibe coded a saas and it went nowhere because it wasn't a good enough idea to begin with. I consulted with multiple varied models along the way for competitive analysis, pricing structure etc.
AI doesn't solve for ideas and product market fit. But it did allow me to fail pretty fast before I sunk too much time into it. But also, I should have spoken to potential users earlier rather than vibe coding.
Re: The bespoke software revolution? I'm not buying it
#43With all due respect to what Jason Fried &co have achieved, this is wrong. Bespoke sofware does exist. And yes, consultants small and large have built, deployed, and charged through the roof for bespoke software. And often it sucks. Here's why it sucks: because clients can't coherently describe what they need, don't have a budget, consultancies don't care and - critically - the person writing the spec (and controling…
However:
Excel is 'free-at-point-of-use', i.e. once you've paid for it, to use it doesn't cost anymore. But LLMs do cost per use (unless we all go to local models). Either this cost is billed directly, or some sort of bundling occurs with 'fair use' limits.
Excel is deterministic, yes scary spaghetti-fied spreadsheets are routinely constructed, but, for example, sorting a result column somewhere can be done with a bit of poking in the right place. LLMs have a tendency to dangerously change many things if the prompting is a bit wrong (and even if it is a bit right).
Re: The bespoke software revolution? I'm not buying it
#44100%. Saas isn’t going away, but the economics are changing drastically and that’s bad for one-size-fits-all tools, and excellent for niche solutions. But it’s still saas, just more specific.
Businesses don’t want to use dozens of hyper-specific tools from dozens of vendors, if they instead can use a single vendor that can already do 80% of it and can vibe-code them the remaining 20%. I don’t see how this favors niche vendors.
Re: The bespoke software revolution? I'm not buying it
#45The main point everyone seems to be making is that now with AI anyone can make a SaaS. The initial reaction I think most people have to this is "SaaS companies/devs are in trouble." I actually think the opposite is true. With an outpouring of vibe-coded apps/SaaS, you have the new wave of vulnerabilities/leaks/problems that happen even with the best software. Except now, it's worse because it's being done on platform…
This is basically why I buy the tech dip. When you pay for software, you pay for infrastructure, expertise, QA, consumer relations, having staff on call, etc. It was always possible to replace enterprise software by 2 guys coding a product in 6 months, but you still need everything around the code before serious clients will want to work with you, and at that point you're a regular software company. All these vibe co…
This is exactly right.
You know what's funny, less than a week ago I signed up for Basecamp.
Could I have asked Codex/Claude to whip me up a Basecamp clone with the exact features I want?
Of course. Do I want to deal with managing that codebase, even with AI? No.
The problem has been solved and the $15/mo. is well worth the time I will save not having to deal with managing that codebase and can instead focus my attention on things that bring in revenue.
Re: The bespoke software revolution? I'm not buying it
#46I don’t disagree if models stay as capable as they are today. But devils advocate: the point of the saaspocalypse isn’t just that anyone will be able to make their own software, it’s also that the AI will be good enough and interconnected enough to maintain it. The world these investors are envisioning is not one where a software engineer gives a detailed spec to a model and reviews its output, deploys the resulting…
Imagine that you are a consultant. You get a call that starts with, "Hi, this is Joe Schmoe and Schmoe Law Firm. I need a new billing system. Can you build me one?" And you respond by saying that you can, but you need to do a _lot_ of work with him to spec this billing system out. You can't just build "a new billing system" without any more details. You tell him that this will take many hours of work between the two…
That billing system will end glue code that links existing Big SaaS players which AI can handle just fine.
Consultants are not spinning up a bespoke SaaS product given the risk.
Re: The bespoke software revolution? I'm not buying it
#47Neither am I. It feels like the dotcom in the sense that people will be spitting out new apps all overt the place. Down the line they will have problems maintaining them (and will say it's not core to their business) and they will revert to SaaS. However i expect the SaaS apps to have super low margins compared to today. Instead of 20-30% it will be 5-7% and the companies will be a shadow of themselves.
Right so teams will shrink and we'll have more "bespoke" SaaS with more small biz services making enough to support maybe 5-10? Sounds just like the bespoke software product companies and consultants out there.
Thats my guess and I think this might happen in other domains like games as well.
Re: The bespoke software revolution? I'm not buying it
#48I don’t disagree if models stay as capable as they are today. But devils advocate: the point of the saaspocalypse isn’t just that anyone will be able to make their own software, it’s also that the AI will be good enough and interconnected enough to maintain it. The world these investors are envisioning is not one where a software engineer gives a detailed spec to a model and reviews its output, deploys the resulting…
I really struggle to imagine that working. What does “a new billing system” even mean? How is it better than the old system?
The AI will link existing APIs with glue code; slurp up data, map it to appropriate CRUD ops with Intuit or something.
We are way beyond the 90s-early 00s wild west where billing can be some random consultants opinions.
Re: The bespoke software revolution? I'm not buying it
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Re: The bespoke software revolution? I'm not buying it
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