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AI is killing B2B SaaS

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451–460 of 752 posts

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#451
It's the opposite IMHO. AI is enabling a lot more B2B SaaS. There are a lot of companies that are running on outdated software. Especially in manufacturing and industry. They've had decades of experience with very expensive IT projects where cost got out of hand because things just are very complicated in the real world.

There are many millions of companies that are going to be re-examining if they can do better in the next years. The work will still be very complicated but with the help of AI, small IT shops might just deliver enough value to be worth the trouble.

The notion of e.g. busy floor plant/logistics managers vibe coding this themselves is silly. 1) they don't have the time; these people are super busy 2) they lack the ability. 3) they'll want it done properly 4) their employers won't skip all the certifications, iso stuff, and what not.

Companies invest in SAAS software if it delivers some kind of revenue/profit benefits. If it's too expensive/complex, it can't do that. AI tools lower the cost of SAAS solutions. So the totally addressable market grows. Companies will want to maximize their ROI though. So, they'll do the usual and engage software companies and integrators to help them do this. They'll expect to pay less for more. And there will be lots of haggling around that topic. But there's an enormous amount of companies that are quite far behind on getting their operations into this century in terms of IT already. There are going to be early adopters looking for early successes here that will put pressure on their competitors if they are successful.

I'm running a small company in this space. We're seeing a lot of opportunities right now. And AI is making my work massively easier already. All those complex ERP integrations just became an order of magnitude easier to do with a small team. They are still hard though. Forget about vibe coding that. You need a plan.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that just because anyone can do it, doesn't mean they will. Lots of people have really great ideas but very few actually commit to execution. Ultimately ROI will go down, deincentivizing the commercialization of that thing someone wanted to bang out in a weekend. In the very long term, software will become a commodity, as you mentioned. Process and workflow may move into JIT delivery for the need at hand, in…

> Lots of people have really great ideas but very few actually commit to execution. This is true when you had to work hard for those ideas. Now you have LLMs. It means more people can sling a lot more crap at walls with fewer barriers to entry.

I think my point is that not everyone is suddenly going to go and start making stuff. There will definitely be an increase, which is a net positive because we can start exploring unknown areas of interest more rapidly, we can fail faster, etc. Fewer barriers to entry will increase competition, lower prices, increase efficiency, and theoretically benefit the consumer.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#453
post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This vibe-coding-will-replace-SaaS insanity is the new crypto-will-replace-fiat-money insanity.

No serious programmer "vibe" codes. I admit creating SaaS may not be feasible with current infrastructure but you can't ignore the insane jump in productivity that these tools can offer with the right scaffolding.

This website is 70-80% vibe coding frauds pretending to be experts.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Later my boss told me not to do that again because it caused havoc with schedules and such. Did you talk to anyone about your plans before you brought in the demo or let them know they were solved problems? Often these sorts of reactions come down to your boss not wanting their team to lose their jobs because of the perception that it can all be handled by one person who's happy to work weekends.

I wasn’t politically savvy enough to do that. Honestly, I don’t want to be. The reality was that the project really could have been done in a month by a couple of people. It got turned into an enterprise project with multiple unaligned teams with Gantt charts and milestones and everything. Again, and I can’t emphasize this enough, for a Django CRUD app . It was a 4 person-week project turned into a major ordeal. No o…

You’re doing God’s work. Don’t let the bastards grind you down. Keep building.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Later my boss told me not to do that again because it caused havoc with schedules and such. Did you talk to anyone about your plans before you brought in the demo or let them know they were solved problems? Often these sorts of reactions come down to your boss not wanting their team to lose their jobs because of the perception that it can all be handled by one person who's happy to work weekends.

I wasn’t politically savvy enough to do that. Honestly, I don’t want to be. The reality was that the project really could have been done in a month by a couple of people. It got turned into an enterprise project with multiple unaligned teams with Gantt charts and milestones and everything. Again, and I can’t emphasize this enough, for a Django CRUD app . It was a 4 person-week project turned into a major ordeal. No o…

I've been in a similar situation, with a laravel product quoted for over a million and I quoted 40K and did it all.

That did not go down well, even though it was a great product, styled etc. had all the bells and whistles.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#456
There will be an exiting explosion of internal apps and tools and then it will die down as companies get back to business. All those tools and apps will turn into legacy apps and they will eventually try to migrate data off them into some saas platform because its not core to business.

Saas will have to drop prices to be competitive so fat margins will go away which will probably affect margins for AWS etc.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#457
post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OTOH, I was hired by an enterprise that was many months into a giant backend rewrite. After wrapping my head around the many plans, I realized they were rewriting Django, badly. One weekend I prototyped the whole thing… in Django. It worked. It met the specs. It was a CRUD app with a REST API. I came in to work Monday morning, showed it off, and inadvertently triggered a firestorm. Later my boss told me not to do tha…

I can relate to this so much. When I was a newly joined Google consultant at a partner firm, we went to their office - some 13 different types of cuisines, different types of game rooms, lounges and what not. A luxury star hotel experience. We were waiting for our meeting on behalf of this one particularly large media client who was bleeding money on Wordpress. 3 engineers arrived - fashionably late. We explained the…

It’s funny you complain about the sales pitch the guy gave you, but the comment itself sounds like a sales pitch :)

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#458
post #339
post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’re having a correlated outage like that, then it’s likely you fix the prod issue before the cloud engineers at some giant cloud company even respond to an internal escalation much less fixes an issue. More than likely your prod issue is causing the logging problem. If you mean you are experiencing two totally unrelated issues at the same time, then I don’t think that’s a reasonable thing to really assign much…

> I don’t think that’s a reasonable thing to really assign much value to as it’s incredibly unlikely. In my experience the systems/tools needed to debug production issues are often only used when they’re needed. Which now means you need health and uptime monitoring on your log server since without that, it might break randomly and no one notices until you need it. > The hypothetical problems people imagine for on-pre…

I don’t think it’s necessarily safer or better for anything but your job security.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#459
post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry but the amount of companies that need something like DataDog is quite small compared to their 30,000+ customer count. Maybe 5,000 companies on Earth truly need something like DataDog, 80% of their customers would be perfectly fine with a self hosted instance of grafana. Using an open source self hosted solution should be the industry standard, encouraged position, by default. Our industry does not gain over…

> Why are we acting like it's hard to set up? Because the current generation of “full stack” engineers are great at spinning up react apps, but struggle with infrastructure and systems management. It’s really not any more complicated than that. On a typical 8 person engineering team, maybe 1 or 2 people will know how to deploy anything to the cloud if you’re lucky. The expertise just isn’t there at most companies.

Surely all the engineers that existed 20 years ago haven’t simply retired? At the time if you told someone you couldn’t set up your own server they’d ask you what kind of engineer you are then?

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#460
post #382

> What they don’t know, though, is that a poorly architected system will fail, eventually. As every senior programmer (eventually) understands, our job is complex because we have to understand the relationships in the real world, the processes involved, and the workflows needed, and representing it in a robust way to create a stable system. AI can’t do that. I have a strong feeling the future's going to look like thi…

You're assuming that code in the future will need to be unvibed. Either the code will be good, or AI will be good enough to unvibe it. That might be awhile in the future but it will happen.
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