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

701–710 of 752 posts

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#701

Post by dirkc »

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…

I reckon a lot of re-writes tend to take "them 5x as long as they had hoped" and "isn't even any easier than the old code" exactly because writing the code wasn't the problem in the first place.

It's business logic, edge cases and other small necessary details that accumulated over time which make the code 'messy'. Once you've integrated all those in the new system, it likely looks equally messy. And discovering and implementing all those extra requirements is probably what took you the longest.

Not to say this applies to all re-writes or that AI tools can't help the process

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#702

Post by rafterydj »

hermannj314 wrote: post #600
donohoe wrote: post #592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s great. The overhead is that you have to host it and maintain the environment and app. If there is downtime that’s now your responsibility. If that’s better than $x/month to be someone else’s problem then it’s a win.

Is there a middle ground that hasn't emerged yet? Someone to host and manage your SLop-As-A-Serivce (SLAAS) for a price point in the middle. That feels like a business.

Hey, that sounds like OpenAI!

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#703

Post by gnerd00 »

sunir wrote: post #653
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…

It’s hardly basic social skill. This is an executive management skill set. That’s the advanced game. The basic social skill is to avoid conflict and seek acceptance. Go along to get along. One wouldn’t rewrite the app on one’s on recognizance without peer approval first if this is your vibe.

some people discuss these dynamics as sheep versus goats. Social stability was more precious due to scarcity, while goat behavior included 40 armed men killing their rivals with swords (and better if the rivals do not have their own swords). Many, many parallels exist in mammals that live in groups. You might be surprised at the details of how some mammals actually behave in real life!

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#704

Post by osigurdson »

unsupp0rted wrote: post #684
osigurdson wrote: post #682

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How detailed are the business requirements however? "Increase NPV" is certainly a business requirement, albeit a very abstract one. "Add a checkbox to this form" is another, far more concrete business requirement.

Good AI asks clarification questions. Codex plan mode is already getting there-ish.

I suppose it is really only possible to know how close something is until it arrives. When I type in "Maximize NPV" into Codex / Claude Code, I feel like it is incredibly far away from full autonomous capability. I guess we will see.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#705

Post by strangattractor »

strange_quark wrote: post #250
strangattractor wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of the hype surrounding AI will subside when a SaaS company eventually deploys a moltbot version of their software and the company is driven out of existence due to the chaos that ensues.

So… next week then?

I wish I knew:). I kind of think Palantir is particularly at risk here. Image a company with siloed data behind APIs and access to other external data APIs. Using something like Claude I could tie all the separate sources into an easily digestible dashboard without any help from Palantir.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#706

Post by kstrauser »

rectangleboy wrote: post #694
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…

I was complaining about SQLAlchemy's insane quirks to a group from my alma mater and one of the grad students said, "Well, the solution to your problem is clear: Write your own ORM." and I had to explain that this startup does not want to get into the ORM-writing business.

I freaking love SQLAlchemy. Those quirks once let me build a sane API on top of a legacy database (ported from Visual FoxPro hourly using a program I also wrote for the task). Some of the fields were values in an XML doc shoved into a DB column because the original programmer thought that was a good idea at the time. I wrote indexes and virtual columns that let other devs query those fields just like everything else.

It has its edge cases, but Alchemy is the greatest thing in the world when you need its exact features.

But yes, I’ve used that line plenty of times: “we’re not in the X-writing business”. I mean, sometimes you can’t help it, but those should be exceedingly rare cases.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#707

Post by jimbokun »

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.

I mean yeah what did you think politics meant?

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#708

Post by vovavili »

jayd16 wrote: post #668
vovavili wrote: post #661

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the free alternatives are also expensive, just a different type of cost Not if you hire reasonably competent people. These days for vast majority of FOSS services all you need is an ability to spin up a VPS and run a number of simple Docker/Podman Compose commands, it can't be that hard.

Ok so they cost you reasonably competent people. Those are expensive!

Only if your company already is lacking in the domain of competence of your engineers. If that is the case, either you have bigger problems to worry about, or your product probably isn't impressive enough to begin with to warrant an addition of complex, enterprise-grade SaaS tooling.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#709

Post by adtac »

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…

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

tiktok alone has 1.5 million directors! it's just that we call them creators now.

the meaning of the word director has changed, that's all. but professional roles shift in meaning all the time. a computer used to be a literal human doing arithmetic. an engineer was someone who designed war machinery. being a doctor used to mean teaching at an university.

human beings are natural tool makers. we always have been. the frontier material to manipulate where the most advanced engineering happens constantly changes: stone -> bronze -> iron -> ink (descartes) -> steel -> silicon -> javascript (YOU ARE HERE).

notice how each step is an improvement/abstraction on top of the steps that came before it. some say english is next in that chain. i honestly have no idea. all i know is there will always be The Next Thing and it'll be much nicer to work with.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#710

Post by WarmWash »

laurentiurad wrote: post #659
WarmWash wrote: post #632

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> can accelerate in adding new features to their products If anything AI helps companies escape the "feature wheel" that is used to justify exorbitant costs, while providing debatable (and often even negative) utility to the end user. Keep in mind, Excel '98 would still probably be overkill for 85% of people's needs in 2025. What companies thought was adding more utility, was actually just continually stacking costs…

“Overkill for 85% of people” is a vibes statistic, not an argument. Also you're generalizing some things to the whole sector like every software provider now is useless and the new features they add are not bringing any values. How can you make such generic statements about a sector that is so diverse? I start to suspect some of you are just private-equity-sponsored accounts trying to push Anthropic propaganda over t…

People in tech are so wildly detached from how everyday people on the ground use computers.
Post reply on HN