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

671–680 of 752 posts

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#671

Post by yesbabyyes »

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…

Not saying you're wrong in all cases, but there are enough examples of hugely expensive megaprojects which totslly tanked, which would have definitely been much more successful with OPs approach if executed correctly. Not saying they would be done and done within a weekend, that's silly. But the alternative, poorly defined integration interfaces, multiple contractors, multiple stakeholders with conflicting requirements and zero (real) regard for the user is unfortunately fairly common, both in public (city/regional/government) and private bureaucracies.

The examples are legion, and they always seem to have NIH and baroque requirements, and be rather over- than underspecified. I would go so far as to say that these projects are almost never successful (and definitely never on time and budget).

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#672

Post by Forgeties79 »

thinkindie wrote: post #647
Forgeties79 wrote: post #627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-con…

My point was along this line: writing code is different than building a product as much as recording a video is different than telling a story with a movie (long and short that you want). Do everyone has the capability to build a comprehensive set of features that we call a product to solve problems that people or business have in their life? That’s why I’m always skeptical about measuring AI impact based solely on q…

Like I said I agree with your larger point. But it’s actually not a great example, because lowering the barrier to entry, particularly the hardware side, led to a massive increase in the number of filmmakers and films in the world. People telling full stories from start to finish included. The reason it doesn’t graft well onto the AI discussion is that the process and output are controlled and measurable. There’s no real black box element. What you see is what you get and the output of the camera is fully controlled by the user.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#673

Post by myrandomcomment »

dsr_ wrote: post #665
stuxnet79 wrote: post #634

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure it has been codified into a "law" but really this is just basic social skills / emotional intelligence which engineers on the spectrum struggle with. If you've spent any time in a large enough organization you realize quickly that hierarchies form based on status, power and influence & not necessarily technical merit. No it's not "the best person for the job" that rises up and tells you what to do. Casually solv…

Competent management says: "Look how clever we were to hire this person and put them in the right place at the right time! We are now ahead of schedule and are reallocating teams." There's remarkably little competent management.

My rule had always been "hire people smarter than you and give them everything they need to succeed". Set a clearly defined goal, ensure understanding of the reasons behind it then provide the support the team needs to make it happen.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#675

Post by raincole »

fourside wrote: post #670
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 wasn’t politically savvy enough to do that. Over the years I’ve come to realize that what people call politics at times is just having interpersonal skills.

In this case, more like common sense.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#676

Post by zero_shift »

resonious wrote: post #589
thinkindie wrote: post #565

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 l…

> writing code has always been the easiest part Let me provide some possible evidence against this: so many teams are desperate to rewrite their codebase but struggle to actually do so. And when they finally make the leap, it takes them 5x as long as they had hoped. Then sometimes the new code isn't even any easier than the old code. I personally find writing code to be a huge time suck and I'm very happy that AI hel…

But again, how much of that time is spent writing code?

I've done rewrites, replatforms, a bunch of times. The actual programming is not the tricky part, but instead (1) picking apart the legacy system, understanding what to build, (2) orchestrating the work to shift transactions from service A to service B without breaking anything.

Teams and especially developers love to think they can skip that phase and just crack on with the programming, invariably what happens is the same as described above: intoxicating velocity followed by a hard stop when you realise you haven't solved problems (1) or (2) above

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#677

Post by unsupp0rted »

osigurdson wrote: post #649
unsupp0rted wrote: post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not a 1000X improvement in current AI. That's more like a 2x ~ 5x improvement in current AI, which is measured in months.

So, within months your prompt can simply be "increase NPV" and machines will do the rest? If not, what prompt will work perfectly in your estimation by the end of the year?

“Analyze these business requirements and create a software solution for the problems you identified”.

Right now it can get part way there but quickly falls flat.

In 12-24 months? It’ll be able to audit itself and determine how to fix issues as they come up, mid-stream. That’s (all of) what a human dev does.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#678

Post by dizlexic »

bonesss wrote: post #501
dizlexic wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tbh I think you’re fundamentally misunderstanding the issue (or I am). It’s not about some single dude disrupting the saas market. It’s about largish companies who already have internal dev teams, slowly weening their company off these ginormous one size fits all saas products and building local, tailored solutions. It’s death by a thousand cuts from the erosion of their highest paying customers.

I feel the market forces kinda point the other way, though, since the customization of the SaaS is also cheapening, but faster and more targeted than these internal teams. Over time I believe that’ll lead to more, not less, SaaS consolidation. Let’s put the cost of code production at 0: regulatory compliance with payment processing laws or industry oversight is a recurring job that’s common for the whole industry whe…

My current boss is an ex CTO of IBM, and tbh he's proof that more people should have been fired for buying an IBM.

Unrelated to the convo you make some very valid points. I just absolutely detest that saying xD

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#679

Post by pizzafeelsright »

AlienRobot wrote: post #270
risyachka wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In any usable product making a product is like 20% or less. Enter compliance, security, payments and a million other things. Even if you can build it in a day B2B SaaS will continue to prosper because they sell peace of mind, reliability and compliance. Not features. Also due to economy of scale it will always be cheaper to buy something from a vendor that sells it to many clients than to DIY it.

Yep. It's a funny thing. You build a Twitter. Profiles have posts, posts can have images, etc. It's very easy to model the database. But then how do you make money with it? Now you need to build a separate system for advertising? Or do you want to sell subscriptions? Which means you need to build a separate system to handle payments. This is usually the big one, because when you handle money, what happens if there is…

These are two different problems.

AI has solved the 'coding' part. The business is still very human because they are the ones buying, for now.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#680

Post by nilkn »

It really isn't. Nobody's migrating their payroll vendor to some vibecoded app. I agree with Jensen Huang that this reaction doesn't make sense at all.

My own prediction is that reliable vibecoding will be additive. It's a new capability that will help high-agency people do things faster or answer questions they couldn't easily answer before. Need to spin up a big custom Monte Carlo calculation and want a simple UI to control and configure it? You can just throw that together now. Need to get a draft budget allocation for a big set of projects calibrated against a set of conflicting constraints? Let an agent crank at it for a couple hours, then review and refine manually -- or just toss it out if you don't like it.

But building, running, and maintaining production-grade services or apps that the company relies on for its basic functioning? You're not just paying the SaaS vendor for having built the product -- you're paying them to maintain it, run it, and respond to issues promptly. You're also paying them to keep building it and improving it over time. To be clear, I think there are certainly cases where the rise of "coding AGI" is going to lead companies to build some services internally versus buying from a vendor, but I predict these will be highly custom and bespoke services that are too tailored for a specific corporation to make sense for a third-party vendor to try to sell.

Post reply on HN