AI is killing B2B SaaS

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Lets break this down. There is very little in newness in what Anthropic announced. Claude had skills for a long time. They have added one more layer of abstraction and called it plugins. This mainly comes with a set of integrations.

Thats the pitch.

But, what are Claude plugins?

Plugins=Commands+Skills+Integrations.

Commands are specific to Claude code. But commands and skills are nothing but prompts at their basest level.

So what is the main differentiator?

Integrations.

But what are you integrating with?

SaaS companies.

And what is the stock market doing?

Dumping SaaS stocks.

How do they think Claude cowork will work without the integrations. Without the system of records.

If anything, these SaaS products have become more important. If I was a trading guy, I would go to the github of claude plugins, see the default integrations and buy the stock of those companies.

I have few sticks in the sand in my thinking framework:

* writing code has always been the easiest part of building software, deciding what to do and what not to do is something else that takes forever sometimes

* there are several open source projects that can replace commercial SaaS and still people prefer to purchase commercial SaaS. These are available immediately, deployed immediately etc etc.

* along the same line, some of those open source projects offer self-hosting and cloud version: I would always personally go for the cloud version because in a small team I don't want to operate something that other people built and I don't know how to operate. That's not my job not my team job

* people are underestimating how draining is operating and maintaining software, which is something that goes beyond the adrenaline rush you get after "building" something with Lovable or similar tools. Also, I find it extremely easy to get 80% done quickly but excruciatingly slow to get things done right.

* I still see huge value in using tools like Lovable to build a working prototype and validate assumptions so that you get quickly build the right thing right solving the right problem in the right away avoiding waste

* camcorders have been around for ages but you don't have millions of directors around just because you make a tool more accessible

* same can be said for other things like restaurants, where sometimes it's more convenient (although expensive) to buy vs build.

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for profit software is pretty gross tho. it can be made indefinitely complex, and people can make and sell tools to patchwork the complexity together, but then u need more tools to patchwork all the tools together ...

and u end up in aggregators aggregated aggregators type situation where optimal solutions never arise because we don't actually cooperate enough to produce them

ai is fitting into the notion that this is all bullshit ... even if not in the correct way