Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI is killing B2B SaaS

nmn.gl

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

511–520 of 752 posts

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#511

Post by mittensc »

bandrami wrote: post #203
mittensc wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what if this time it's senior developers and they actually can slap something together better then the expensive SAAS offerings? what if the expensive SAAS offering is just as vibe coded and poor quality as what a junior offers?

To the first question, if your senior devs can do that there's almost certainly something more directly valuable to your business they could be doing than solving a problem your vendor has already solved The second question is a valid one, and I think it will somewhat raise the bar of what successful SAAS vendors will have to offer in coming years

depends how much the vendor chargers.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#512

Post by kavalg »

kstrauser wrote: post #397
bandrami wrote: post #162

It's a tale as old as time that developers, particularly junior developers, are convinced they could "slap together something in one weekend" that would replace expensive SAAS software and "just do the parts of it we actually use". Unfortunately, the same arguments against those devs regular-coding a bespoke replacement apply to them vibe-coding a bespoke replacement: management simply doesn't want to be responsible…

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…

In the beginning of my career, I've been once told by my senior management that I should never again:

1. Optimize things so that they work 10 000 times faster because it makes us look incompetent (must be done slowly to show gradual progress).

2. Brag about such optimization (to stakeholders) without first synchronizing this with them (so they can brag proportionally to their pay rate :) ).

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#513

Post by CER10TY »

lampe3 wrote: post #508
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…

Oh I have seen this story and was the one who caused this story when I was younger. In a lot of cases the "new guy" thinks its an easy software and does it on his free time and thinks he did a great job. In reality the specs are never 100% done correctly. The "new guy" misses some edge cases everybody but him knew because its just company knowledge. A lot of info in the specs was missing since they are not complete a…

It swings both ways though. I've seen plenty of older engineers dismiss the "new guys" effort and claim that everything had to be custom written, because there's no way a common framework like Django could cover their use case. The same type of engineer has never once worked with a common framework though, so they don't know what's included nowadays.

Turns out it's a lot easier to build on top of a common framework than do everything from scratch.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#514

Post by j4coh »

bandrami wrote: post #162

It's a tale as old as time that developers, particularly junior developers, are convinced they could "slap together something in one weekend" that would replace expensive SAAS software and "just do the parts of it we actually use". Unfortunately, the same arguments against those devs regular-coding a bespoke replacement apply to them vibe-coding a bespoke replacement: management simply doesn't want to be responsible…

I guess one difference is now you can ask an LLM, trained on an open core product, to generate a license-free version of it.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#515

Post by AtomicLynx »

Look, software is not going away even though everybody thinks they're a developer now. Do you think companies are going to replace Microsoft Windows, of which there are a billion installs, or Salesforce, Crowdstrike, Quickbooks etc, with some Vibe coded AI slop an intern "coded"?

When enterprises/businesses in general upgrade any software in the company it takes years sometimes... There is also Vendor lock in, you can't just swap things with vibe-coded slop, and trust me your manager will never want to do that either because his butt will be on the line.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#516

Post by lampe3 »

CER10TY wrote: post #513
lampe3 wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh I have seen this story and was the one who caused this story when I was younger. In a lot of cases the "new guy" thinks its an easy software and does it on his free time and thinks he did a great job. In reality the specs are never 100% done correctly. The "new guy" misses some edge cases everybody but him knew because its just company knowledge. A lot of info in the specs was missing since they are not complete a…

It swings both ways though. I've seen plenty of older engineers dismiss the "new guys" effort and claim that everything had to be custom written, because there's no way a common framework like Django could cover their use case. The same type of engineer has never once worked with a common framework though, so they don't know what's included nowadays. Turns out it's a lot easier to build on top of a common framework t…

Sure I had an older dev do bit masking for a list of 3 options in javascript because he was used to old terminals.

Its something different coming in and changing things here and there but rewriting the hole thing on a weekend is something different.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#517

Post by kjksf »

lampe3 wrote: post #508
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…

Oh I have seen this story and was the one who caused this story when I was younger. In a lot of cases the "new guy" thinks its an easy software and does it on his free time and thinks he did a great job. In reality the specs are never 100% done correctly. The "new guy" misses some edge cases everybody but him knew because its just company knowledge. A lot of info in the specs was missing since they are not complete a…

I think it's safe to say that ORM in Django is, in fact, better in all possible ways than an ORM someone at some company just wrote. Including speed and handling edge cases.

We only know what OP wrote and he doesn't sell himself as a genius but as someone who was competing with really, really bad ideas.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#518

Post by neya »

Aeolun wrote: post #457
neya wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

Hey, really sorry, I'm genuinely not trying to sell anything (I don't have a product to sell...yet). I can see why you might have interpreted like that though. And it's unfortunately too late to edit my comment. I'll try to think less sales-y next time.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#519

Post by neya »

smartbit wrote: post #463
Aeolun wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

IMHO it sounds more like someone who is proud of solving a problem for very little effort that Google tried to sell a very expensive solution for.

Thank you, that's exactly what I was trying to convey

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#520

Post by wiseowise »

kavalg wrote: post #512
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…

In the beginning of my career, I've been once told by my senior management that I should never again: 1. Optimize things so that they work 10 000 times faster because it makes us look incompetent (must be done slowly to show gradual progress). 2. Brag about such optimization (to stakeholders) without first synchronizing this with them (so they can brag proportionally to their pay rate :) ).

This was the moment I’ve stopped putting any effort in my work.
Post reply on HN