Back To Atoms: Why we can stop building SaaS and build the future instead.
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Re: Back To Atoms: Why we can stop building SaaS and build the future instead.
#2Yea but business needs are constantly evolving, most of the time one step ahead of the accurate understanding of what needs to be done. We get paid, in theory, to build that, but main expense is not actually building, it's finding what needs to be done and then maintaining it. No ai can address that imho
Re: Back To Atoms: Why we can stop building SaaS and build the future instead.
#3Yea but business needs are constantly evolving, most of the time one step ahead of the accurate understanding of what needs to be done. We get paid, in theory, to build that, but main expense is not actually building, it's finding what needs to be done and then maintaining it. No ai can address that imho
If you don’t think an AI could do that then I think you need more imagination and to follow the OOMs
Re: Back To Atoms: Why we can stop building SaaS and build the future instead.
#4Let's assume that AI is human level (it's not, but humour me). Let's assume that businesses can buy an off-the-shelf black box of AI that will run whatever business IT process they want to run. Customer data goes in, actions for humans to perform come out. It's basically an automated call centre full of humans.
Now something goes wrong. A customer isn't getting what they ordered. What do you do about it?
Do you just drop the customer? Well that's lost revenue, or an easy win for another company, you don't want to do that. Maybe you tell the AI to fix the customer in a particular way and hope it will do so. If it does, all it takes is having a human available to fix it (a customer support dept, even if tier 2), but if it doesn't fix it now you still need all the software you needed before to fix it.
I've built line-of-business software before, and I've over-automated things before. Being able to inspect the state of systems, and being able to manually change things in software, is incredibly valuable. This is why spreadsheets run businesses.
My bet is that companies will still mostly buy the software they were buying before, but that some of the interactions with that software that humans would have done before, AI tools will action instead. All the same CMSs, CRMs, ERPs, and other TLAs will exist, they'll just be augmented with AI. They'll probably do some more interesting things with that AI, but they'll still exist in fundamentally the same way. Companies are not going to entrust their business to a black box that sometimes says no.
Re: Back To Atoms: Why we can stop building SaaS and build the future instead.
#5Yea but business needs are constantly evolving, most of the time one step ahead of the accurate understanding of what needs to be done. We get paid, in theory, to build that, but main expense is not actually building, it's finding what needs to be done and then maintaining it. No ai can address that imho
Came exactly to say this.
We often don't solve technical problems or write algorithm. We're here to understand a client who doesn't know what he wants. Good luck for the general purpose AI to solve this [1] "If Architects had to work like Programmers"
Re: Back To Atoms: Why we can stop building SaaS and build the future instead.
#6How do you build Stripe payments with LLMs.
Only very shallow SaaS may be killed with LLMs but not 98% of em.
Re: Back To Atoms: Why we can stop building SaaS and build the future instead.
#7How do you build Stripe payments with LLMs. Only very shallow SaaS may be killed with LLMs but not 98% of em.
I can't even get an LLM to accurately demonstrate how to use the Stripe API except for very basic scenarios.
Re: Back To Atoms: Why we can stop building SaaS and build the future instead.
#8Software is eating the world, but according to [0] there's only 27 million of us in the whole world.
We need all the tools we can get to amplify our efforts.
Further, I find that AI makes it much easier to dabble outside my wheelhouse and to interface with other technical people much quicker and better. Where I used to have to read endlessly to understand the context of unknown-to-me technology, now I can get that in seconds. Previously this luxury was only available to large corporates who can hire a wide variety of experts.
I think we'll see dramatically more 1-10 person software businesses in future.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_engineering_demograph...
Re: Back To Atoms: Why we can stop building SaaS and build the future instead.
#9My experience tells me that the world of atoms requires a perfectly level playing field in order to support reliable businesses. The world of atoms is inherently stochastic with many unexpected events. We cannot plan for the future if the government intervenes in the markets. It's hard enough to plan for 'natural' events. We shouldn't also have to worry about the thousands of ways in which the government could destroy the incentives and dynamics that are vital to your business. In the world of atoms, failure incurs high costs. Whenever you opt for value creation as a business, you put yourself at the mercy of government policies because the government, through monetary policy, can distort markets in extremely harmful, unpredictable ways.
Re: Back To Atoms: Why we can stop building SaaS and build the future instead.
#10Yea but business needs are constantly evolving, most of the time one step ahead of the accurate understanding of what needs to be done. We get paid, in theory, to build that, but main expense is not actually building, it's finding what needs to be done and then maintaining it. No ai can address that imho
If you don’t think an AI could do that then I think you need more imagination and to follow the OOMs
I think "could" is substantially different from "practically will in a time-frame that matters" and the former is being used as a shortcut for the latter.