61–70 of 97 posts
I’m building an app and many things I’d normally pay for like metrics and emailing I can just do myself.
A friend has a law firm employing 100+ people and they are building so many internal tools they would otherwise be delaying or paying salesforce consultants for.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everything you describe is fantasy, though. It’s not real. It’s not possible to be real. “Give me a new billing system”?? No way is that going to produce a good result for the company or their clients. But the second that Joe Schmo has to start laying out all the ever-evolving requirements for his custom billing system, he will run back to traditional SaaS providers. At best, if AI is supergenius enough to just intui…
I think the idea is you'd basically have it take a look at your current system, it would learn what features you're actually using at all, it'd check company emails for past and current pain points or stuff you wish was possible or just simpler, it'd Slack everyone in the company asking what their biggest wish and biggest pet peeves are currently, it'd do a small interview with Joe himself presenting the above to see…
That will probably come a lot sooner.
The 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…
I agree with you that is incorrect.
With AI, not everyone needs a SaaS.
They can make a bespoke tool for themselves with 5% of the SaaS features they actually need. If it's only used by authorized, internal, users and never exposed to the outside, many of the risks you mention disappear.
That's not to say everyone will vibe-code their Slack replacement, but a bar for relying on an external SaaS vendor will go up (and I think that's a good thing).
Do some people really believe that SaaS margins are dropping because the public at large has discovered that to save 20$/month on some app they can instead vibe code their own and use that instead? My current guess about the future is that the age of SaaS is coming stronger than ever. I expect many vibe coders to come up with half-assed prototypes that will be copiously replicated and improved by more qualified devs…
This of course will be software in general imho. It's not that the profession will disappear overnight. There is going to be this tight squeeze until all the margin/excess salaries/etc.. is gone. There is also going to be immense pressure to produce as much as possible and productivity expectations are going to go way up (even if it is unjustified).
Basically, the good days are over. It's going to be a miserable profession.
> Most people don’t like computers. Nobody in tech wants to say that out loud. People tolerate computers. They use them because they have to. Given the choice, most would rather not think about them at all. Which makes me think there's a lot more room for "virtual people." Imagine a very smart AI bot that could hold multiple conversations at once and remember a lot of things. > So when someone suggests that AI means…
which is essentially the direction that were heading in: we're sequentially and iteratively building improvements.
what the logistics company did pre computers and even pre trucks was not all that different in many aspects.
the future will be via evolution not revolution.
The 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…
Earlier if you had developers and no domain knowledge you were able to land a contract building application for a company and maybe spin it off to get more customers in that niche.
If you got lucky and you landed law firm and made case management for them you probably had nice little niche.
But as it turns out lawyers can also use JIRA, Trello, Basecamp or whatever and they really don't need Facebook for lawyers so those gigs dried up.
Main point is, software development alone is not going to bring as much money as it did earlier. You will have to have backing of domain experts to get the business going to offer something special in your SaaS. Like possibility to actually have call with those domain experts or their oversight on whatever it is you are doing but you not having budget or enough work to hire domain expert full time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's for signaling purposes, not for functional purposes. Who is buying SaaS for signaling purposes over function?
People who need support, and compliance? Things that AI generated slop can not provide
Like that logistics company owner, he doesn't want to fill in your crappy insurance form, he wants to call insurance broker and have an insurance.
Doesn't matter if you put AI in the form, make 10% discount, polish UX to finest levels. He just doesn't want to spend time on it.
Nobody is going to ask Chat GPT to write them an app. They'll just ask something like "show me all the nearby restaurants that don't have any shellfish products for allergic reasons and let me browse like on ubereats", and Chat GPT will (eventually) do the right thing.
People will just see some UI, which will be like many UIs they've seen before. They won't care whether that UI is some UberEats embed designed by a programmer in California, or something that Chat GPT just came up with on the spot to wrap some API.
"Eventually, everybody is going to use computers" was a ridiculous thesis in the age of mainframes. It was a slightly less ridiculous (if still unlikely) thesis in the age of minicomputers. In the DOS days, it started to look likely, in the Windows days, it seemed inevitable, iOS and Android is what made it actually happen.