AI is killing B2B SaaS

Did they know something you didn't know, about that demo/client? i.e. misaligned incentives?

> management simply doesn't want to be responsible for it

The problem with this kind of thinking is that it strips away all nuance. At some point you have to be responsible for something ... otherwise you don't have a business. You are simply a wrapper around your SaaS providers and tightly coupled to their success. The key is knowing when to offload and when to keep it in house. Quite frankly, your average weekend MBA VP simply doesn't have the expertise to make these kinds of decisions. This is why so many VPs exit before things get bad.

> feel free to doubt.

I don't doubt you at all.

I once worked on a project that was a new sign-up process for a large retailer (~90k employees at the time, four figures worth of outlets, quite a few billions in turnover).

There were about 60 people across, I can't even remember, maybe 10 teams that I knew about. One of the managers there assured me that the true participant figure was closer to 160. I was agog.

This project took months, and it had been going for months before I joined. And, as you can imagine, with that many people involved over that sort of timescale, there was turnover: people, sometimes key people, would leave and be replaced - sometimes by others who'd already worked on the project, but sometimes by new people - with the expected disruption that causes.

It was two web pages, plus some back end plumbing across multiple systems.

But, in the grand scheme of things, nothing that complex. I reckon it was a handful of thousands lines of code total across the full stack. I was mostly on the database side and, IIRC, I wrote a few hundred lines of SQL in a couple of stored procedures (wouldn't have been my preferred solution building from scracth but, you know, we weren't, and we had to integrate with a legacy systems that had to keep working as expected).

Overall it took 8 or 9 months from kick off to shipping and I was involved for perhaps 3 months of that towards the end. I was on the call with dozens of other people whilst me and one of the other guys hooked the final pieces together and tested it end to end for the first time... and it worked. There was actual cheering.

Large enterprises are genuinely ridiculous.

I agree with your larger point, however:

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

That’s exactly what happened. There are more filmmakers than ever now due to the accessibility of cheap cameras, then digital tools, including affordable HD cameras. Especially once the DSLR revolution took off circa 2011, which enabled budget-constrained aspiring filmmakers to use prime lens sets rather than fixed/built in zooms on cheap camcorders. With proper lighting they could actually make something look pretty damn cinematic. The entire industry has radically shifted in the last 15 years in particular due to these changes, but it started to shift around 2000 if I have to assign a particular year to it.

When you had to shoot on film stock, which was expensive and had a whole processing pipeline that one couldn’t reasonably do at home, there was a much thicker barrier to entry. You basically had to go to film school or get into the industry before you could start making your own stuff. Hell the Duplass brothers started out on crappy camcorders. Now? A smartphone, some cheap LED’s, a basic computer, you can really make something.

This was the same hype around NoCode a few years ago. Thing is people for software as a service and internal teams dont want to do the service part. A common thread among all of the vibe coded stuff I hear is that nobody talks about the next requirement which was handled. Frankly UIs are learnable and after a few tries everybody gets used to it. The extra polish is totally not worth it. Eventually every SaaS on the non-critical business path gets ripped out with one of the platform players such as SAP, SalesForce etc which are infinitely customizable. Salesforce even has its own language in which customers write their apps.

The system of record bit is quite correct and imo the only durable advantage. But that doesnt explain why Klaviyo shoyld worry. In fact marketing workflows are some of the most important systems of record directly tied to business earnings.

The assumtpion that in SaaS you build once and everybody uses it is false. There are always customizations or features that need to be built for big contracts. Its the small players that are okay with out of the box SaaS since they lack the budget to pay for a customization. Ironically, these teams will get hurt the most should they choose to go down the vibe code everything path. Here infra capex is far lower than payroll and owning too much software (vibe coded or not) will simply steal time from business development.

Honestly, the market just panicked and caused a temporary correction thats all. Then we all got busy and wrote a bunch of thought leadership crap on top.

In reality AI is the best thing to happen to SaaS companies since it reduces RnD time and expenses, allows even small players to bid for large contracts without overloading existing dev capacity and also makes it possible to put devs in front of customers since now there's no need to sit down and code. AI is also the best thing to happen to engineering since it now allows for product management to be folded into the existing craft.