741–750 of 752 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The point of having engineers is to build product and make you money. You're making the assumption that all software development is for software products. My work supports a non-software industry. Every minute that I save of user's time translates into more time they can use to make money. > There's no point in saving $20K on an SaaS app if you use $100K in developer time and miss out on $1M of potential revenue. I…
> You buy a SaaS product then you pay them to install, configure, customize it. Ok, hold up. That is not a SaaS app lol. That is an on-prem installation. Very very very very much not the same thing. The entire point of SaaS is you don't install it on prem. SaaS directly competes with what you're talking about. Before you go declaring an industry is dead, at least understand what it is. > My work supports a non-softwa…
I didn't mean to imply on-prem. "Install" was the wrong word; call that "onboarding" instead. There is always some integration component as well because nothing lives entirely on it's own. Some SaaS providers are really good; no complaints on this part. Some are terrible. I believe one new vendor is going to try and charge us almost $100,000 to integrate their product with our other products. The entire purpose of this product is the integration. This is one I'm pushing to do internally because it's so fiddly.
> The corollary to that is every minute your app doesn't work you cost them money. If you fuck up and store protected data the wrong way or lose data because it tipped over, you're also costing them money.
So? You seem to think SaaS software doesn't go down, break it weird ways, get slow for no reason, etc. Across everything we probably had half a dozen small outages last month. But none of our internal (also cloud) products went down at all. Hell, one of the biggest most common SaaS products in our industry released an undocumented change last month to their API that subtly returned incorrect results. As far as I can tell, they still haven't acknowledged it.
I'm not saying we don't have bugs or bad things don't happen but I don't see why you think that externally purchased software is automatically better.
> I can tell you have never had to clean up one of these apps. Knowing the technology is not the issue.
Good developers produce good results. I have a new intern on my team who's currently still in school and she's absolutely killing it working on our apps. So maybe the problem isn't internal development, it's just shitty developers. Those exist in SaaS products as well; I look at some of their shit and I wonder what we are paying for. It can be well hidden behind nice marketing and big brands but it's still crap.
One vendor tried to sell us a product that was actually sneakily split into two pieces -- one developed in North American in .NET and the other half in India in PHP! They nightly sync the data between them. At the time, we had multiple products for this job and we were looking for one integrated product to replace them. I just happened to notice when looking at the URLs during the sale pitch and that's what caused them to spill the beans. We didn't buy that product.
While a lot of our internal development is complete products, a good chunk is actually filling out the functionality holes or working around bugs in our SaaS products.
> Sure you can. Getting the data is the easy part.
The last one we dropped, we definitely didn't get our data out. In fact, as soon as we cancelled the contract (3 month lead time) we were basically dead to them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
What do you get when you type in “Maximize NPV” to a human?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You buy a SaaS product then you pay them to install, configure, customize it. Ok, hold up. That is not a SaaS app lol. That is an on-prem installation. Very very very very much not the same thing. The entire point of SaaS is you don't install it on prem. SaaS directly competes with what you're talking about. Before you go declaring an industry is dead, at least understand what it is. > My work supports a non-softwa…
> Ok, hold up. That is not a SaaS app lol. That is an on-prem installation. Very very very very much not the same thing. I didn't mean to imply on-prem. "Install" was the wrong word; call that "onboarding" instead. There is always some integration component as well because nothing lives entirely on it's own. Some SaaS providers are really good; no complaints on this part. Some are terrible. I believe one new vendor i…
If you staff an entire team to build apps, update, maintain and deploy changes to them, and run a call rotation, and that's all you do, there's no problem. You just have an internal development team. That's completely fine.
What's not fine is the people going "how hard could it be to replace Y" and slapping something together. Those sort of skunkworks projects have a couple common common failure modes:
1. the project fails after a lot of wasted effort 2. the project succeeds...but is never productionized. The person who wrote it is now stuck writing it forever. Which they might like, but it's miserable if they quit or retired or get hit by a bus aka the bus factor.
If the bus factor is one, that is pretty much always pain.
The point of SaaS and service-contract type enterprise software is not that they are perfect and great and not buggy. Enterprise software sucks a lot. SaaS is usually "you get what you get".
The point is you can't halfass it. Either you go whole ass and staff out a big enough development team (with all the expense and difficulties implied) or you go none ass and buy.
Just because the stock market dips, and a bunch of media outlets ascribe this to AI doesn’t mean that AI ‘caused’ the dip.
If people really think non-tech businesses will start running their own software organizations and maintain all these tools themselves is an idiotic assumption at best.
The “building” of software has never been and will never be the bottleneck.
With a new agentic-lashup tearing across the internet every week, pointing the way to "gradient descent" software development, any purchasing manager worth their salt is going to ask some serious questions about their enormous SaaS bill before committing to another expensive long term contract. It follows that valuations must decline. Even if only because risks to moats have increased, but also because it makes sense…
Preposterous. Have you ever worked for a company as a programmer or for that matter as a manager? They don't just replace products ad hoc. There's an enormous amount of due diligence that goes into any new software product - making sure it fits the company, that it's secure, that it works properly... I recently worked at a small startup who spent on sales force @ $100,000 a year. I said you know what we could do this…
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…
>people are underestimating how draining is operating and maintaining software Yep. Many SaaS have an edge because they factorize the struggle of many customers, if a SaaS has 1000 customers, each customer vibing their way into a home-built solution will require dedicated efforts at maintaining it. Even with AI, those efforts aren't negligible. Many companies don't even operate any IT infrastructure, cloud or otherwi…
In our work, we’ve seen features like AI search and guided workflows improve retention only when they reduce manual effort and are trusted by users. If an AI feature feels like a gimmick, people ignore it. So I’d reframe it: AI is accelerating differentiation, not destroying the category.
Was messing around with Grafana and other stuff, but for session replays and metrics I built UXWizz. Gives me everything self-hosted and avoids those crazy per-user bills [0].