AI is killing B2B SaaS • Hacker News Board

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#471

Post by yieldcrv » Thu, Feb 05, 2026, 6:44 AM UTC

keyle wrote: post #455

kstrauser wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

you got paid the $40k though?

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#472

Post by kstrauser » Thu, Feb 05, 2026, 6:44 AM UTC

rendaw wrote: post #465

kstrauser wrote: post #397

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…

Isn't this agreeing with the parent? If Django were the B2B SaaS product, you didn't vibe-code Django, you just used Django. You aren't responsible for maintaining Django itself.

Django wasn’t the product here, though. I used it as part of the toolkit to “slap something together in one weekend”, and that something was the (actual real life) B2B SaaS product, or at least the user facing interface to it.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#473

Post by selcuka » Thu, Feb 05, 2026, 6:44 AM UTC

kstrauser wrote: post #432

November_Echo wrote: post #425

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…

> No one should have lost their job; they should have been put to work doing the thousand other more productive things

I think that's exactly why you should have talked to your peers and let them know they were solved problems, unless the overengineering was intentional.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#474

Post by kstrauser » Thu, Feb 05, 2026, 6:46 AM UTC

jesterson wrote: post #470

kstrauser wrote: post #397

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…

> Sometimes the new guy can make a better version themselves over the weekend, not because they’re a supergenius, but because they’re not hampered by 47 teams all trying to get their stamp on the project. In 99.9% of cases what seems to be "the better" version is better only for the "new guy" or rather his ego. Those 47 teams hampering doesn't necessarily mean a bad thing, and more often than not actually well justif…

That is often the case, but far from all the time. Other times something is made so needlessly complicated by office politics that it may never get shipped.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#475

Post by selcuka » Thu, Feb 05, 2026, 6:46 AM UTC

keyle wrote: post #455

kstrauser wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> That did not go down well

Enterprise customers are more likely to use a product that they paid $1M over the same product that they "only" paid $40K.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#476

Post by _zagj » Thu, Feb 05, 2026, 6:48 AM UTC

I'm not one to sell generative AI short at this point, but this seems at odds with the longer-term trend towards more centralized, off-the-shelf solutions, like Shopify, Salesforce, Squarespace, over the "bespoke," in-house alternatives that many companies developed in previous decades. Perhaps AI is making the TCO of "rolling your own" so low that it makes sense to go back to that over SaaS?

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#477

Post by yieldcrv » Thu, Feb 05, 2026, 6:49 AM UTC

gbriel wrote: post #460

btown wrote: 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.

> or AI will be good enough to unvibe it

it already is

just point Claude Code at a Claude Code codebase you forgot about for a few weeks with no plan.md or agents.md or memory.md implemented

configure the session correctly this time and put it in plan mode, it will deal with your whole database schemas, migrate, tie everything to the new models correctly, make a backend deployment script, and fix your UI/UX

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#478

Post by kstrauser » Thu, Feb 05, 2026, 6:49 AM UTC

neya wrote: post #448

kstrauser wrote: post #397

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…

Nice work!

Sometimes those complex solutions are the right tool for the job. And other times, you just need to glue some stuff together, call it good, and start making money.

Experience helps a good engineer know when each approach is appropriate.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#479

Post by _zagj » Thu, Feb 05, 2026, 6:51 AM UTC

pixl97 wrote: post #318

cyclo wrote: post #308

Anyone can learn to cook, and the barrier to entry is low. There's no shortage of restaurants though.

There's no shortage of restaurants that go out of business. Even big name brands have issues with location turnover.

That's a great point. The restaurant business is one of the worst you could possibly go into, with razor thin margins and astronomical failure rates. If those are the future economics of SaaS (accustomed to 70-80% gross margins), than you ought to cash out now while you still can.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#480

Post by kstrauser » Thu, Feb 05, 2026, 6:53 AM UTC

selcuka wrote: post #473

kstrauser wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> No one should have lost their job; they should have been put to work doing the thousand other more productive things I think that's exactly why you should have talked to your peers and let them know they were solved problems, unless the overengineering was intentional.

Sometimes you can explain things and not be heard until you demonstrate them. Then they have to accept that you’re not just BSing, that your idea does have at least some merit.

Also, never underestimate an enterprise’s ability to convince itself that it’s too big and complex for off the shelf tools. Sometimes that’s the case. Very often it’s not.

In this case, I’d also watched this all take shape over a couple of months. Being the new person, I assumed it was some necessarily complex beast that was beyond my scrappy experience and calling for Serious Engineering. Once I recognized it for what it was, I knocked out my weekend project shortly afterward because I couldn’t get it out of my head. As much as anything, I had the need to see if it really was as straightforward as I thought it could be. I didn’t sit on my idea for months while they toiled. I watched them toil for months before I understood the core of what they were making.