5 ms·

Good, I will with great pleasure now reiterate my point about people now producing their own code, even complex stuff, rather than downloading potentially malic

by larodi 9mo ago

Good, I will with great pleasure now reiterate my point about people now producing their own code, even complex stuff, rather than downloading potentially malicious and foreign code. Which as a tendency threatens ALL clumsy big ERP service providers selling you SAAS. Go ahead - I'm ready to be down-voted again and again until folks realize it is inevitable, as is inevitable that many companies in the area of business software are going down down down.

deofoo 9mo ago
100%
ramshanker 9mo ago
Not just that, previously many orgs outsourced to consultancy, now when the consultancies also start outsourcing to AI, sooner all business may cut the middleman and have inhouse it teams outsourcing work to AI instead of consultancies !
lelanthran 9mo ago
> Which as a tendency threatens ALL clumsy big ERP service providers selling you SAAS. Wait, what? The big ERP vendors aren't under any threat, the small ones are. No business is going to switch from a system that has armies of low-paid consultants to in house AI developed system that has effectively zero consultants who can come in and perform the deployment with tested integrations to their accounting system, their 200 suppliers, their customer systems and their 3rd party auditing systems. But, small businesses who were not going with a 12m contract for 5 consultants, and who dont have any need for integrations to suppliers, customers and 3rd party systems can do their own systems. It sounds like you are very far removed from ERP and business systems in general. All magnetic coding is going to do is further entrench existing large systems because new systems, whether AI generated or not, will be too numerous for any one of them to gain traction.
- mschild 9mo ago
  > No business is going to switch from a system that has armies of low-paid consultants to in house AI developed system Are you sure about that? Because thats exactly what Klarna is doing/has done. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1957789124930286065.html?utm_source=tldrfintech https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1957789124930286065.html?...
  - lelanthran 9mo ago
    > Are you sure about that? Because thats exactly what Klarna is doing/has done. That link does not say that they are switching away from a system that requires armies of consultants to implement. AFAICT, they are switching away from Jira (Atlassian/confluence products). Those are not ERP systems. Once again, I must point out that the these sorts of assertions reveal that the person making the assertion has never been involved in an ERP rollout, neither a big one nor a small one. And, again, I reiterate, the only threat is to small players in the market, who don't have a community to hire from. Because to become a big player, you need to gain traction as a small player, and if every small ERP system can be replaced with an AI generated system, non single one is ever going to gain traction (Why pay $10/user/month for a basic system when you can have AI generate that for a once of fee and some employee time?)
    - mschild 9mo ago
      Workday is not an ERP? Beyond that, they're effectively replacing major stacks of traditional SaaS tools with in-house ones. Considering the scale and complexity of what Klarna does and the regulations it has to follow across many different markts, I'd say its a valid concern. Now, I don't think SAP etc are going anywhere, especially in traditional businesses where most of the company is reliant on it, but it seems there is a way to do it. That said, plenty of banks still run on mainframes and use COBOL. https://www.salesforceben.com/klarna-salesforce-workday-partnership-called-off-amidst-major-gen-ai-overhaul/ https://www.salesforceben.com/klarna-salesforce-workday-part...
      - lelanthran 9mo ago
        Well lets see how it works out for them - they're ending the partnership for HR software in order to build their own, but they say they haven't built anything yet!
- RobinL 9mo ago
  My wife's old company, a fairly significant engineering consultancy, ran it's entire time/job management and invoicing system from a company wide, custom developed Microsoft Access app called 'Time'. It was developed by a single guy in the IT department and she liked it. About 5 years ago the company was acquired, and they had to move to their COTS 'enterprise' system (Maconomy). All staff from the old company had to do a week long (!) training course in how to use this and she hates it. In future I think there will be more things like 'Time' (though presumably not MS Access based!)
  - spockz 9mo ago
    I still think MS Access was awesome. In the small companies I worked it was used successfully by moderately tech savvy directors and support employees to manage ERP, license generation, invoices, etc. The most heard gripe was the concurrent access to the database file but I think that was solved by backing the forms by accessing anything over odbc. It looked terrible but also was highly functional.
    - RobinL 9mo ago
      Agreed! The first piece of software I built was a simple inventory and sales management system, around 2000. I was 16 and it was just about my first experience programming. It was for school, and I recently found the write up and was surprised how well the system worked. Ever since I've marvelled at how easy it was to build something highly functional that could incorporate complex business logic, and wished there was a more modern equivalent.
      - spockz 9mo ago
        Maybe a combination of AirTable and PowerBI/open-source alternative? Or just ms access backed by a proper database?
        jon-wood 9mo ago
        Grist[1] is great for this stuff, at first glance its a spreadsheet but that spreadsheet is backed by a SQLite database and you can put an actual UI on top of it without leaving the tool, or you can write full blown plugins in Javascript and HTML if you need to go further than that. [1] https://www.getgrist.com/ https://www.getgrist.com/
- larodi 9mo ago
  > It sounds like you are very far removed from ERP and business systems in general. am I really? it sounds so many people in big ERP service providers are oblivious of the tide rising that will wash them away, because you know what - most of these companies are super pricey, super slow, very messy and tend to fail large-scale projects that cost millions? I've seen this happen personally, and I have personally, as a sole player implemented ERPs with custom inhouse software. Trust me brother, I know ERPs very well and seen hundreds of high-profile fakers that have zero knowledge of E/R, Business Architecture, and integrations, that still believe they can get away with nonsense. Hope you're not one of them.
  - lelanthran 9mo ago
    > Hope you're not one of them. I've been part of enough ERP contracts to know that customers evaluate their options based on how easy it is to hire consultants on the open market. I did do quite a lot of custom software prior to AI-slop, and that market is completely destroyed with vibe-coding agents. The ERP one looks like it is simply going to further entrench the big players, because new ERPs evolve from some custom application, and once that pipeline is gone, your choices are going to be "build it yourself with no ability to hire for it" or "Go with one of the existing behemoths". My argument is that AI will remove the pipeline that leads to incumbents seeing more competition.
    - darkwater 9mo ago
      > on how easy it is to hire consultants on the open market. In the not not so distant future (5 years? 10?) that consultant market will be of people with very good process knowledge and very good prompting skills. Which might or might not be in a good part the same consultant market we have today.
- newsclues 9mo ago
  You think the big players aren’t going to use the new tools to massively cut employees and costs?
risyachka 9mo ago
You do realize that making software by developer for his wife means for random business is hiring a third party dev to build custom software? So still, for ransom business much cheaper and better to buy software from SaaS vendor. In this case it was better ONLY because the client is the wife of the developer. And even now, if he sells this to other businesses - it will be MUCH cheaper to buy his subscription than homebrew the same version of it - as if it starts selling it he will be adding features and support which requires time (which is money).
- larodi 9mo ago
  > You do realize that making software by developer for his wife means for random business is hiring a third party dev to build custom software? No, this is not true. There are so many non-technical users of Microsoft Access that run their won businesses without hiring anyone. A friend of mine had a business with an yearly turnover shy of $3M (which is small, alright) and it was running wired spreadsheets and google forms. 20 people. He never ever bought any software, and existed for more than 10 years, until his wife (yes his waifu) decided to divorce and bring the company down. Business Architecture is not so much about writing the software, sorry, we as IT professionals would love to think it is, but this is a super weak bias.
  - deofoo 9mo ago
    So true, we devs are so stuck in our own bubble
  - germinalphrase 9mo ago
    Almost every SMB I interact with sounds like this company. Was it founded more than 10 years ago? Probably holding the ship together with spreadsheets and email.
    - larodi 9mo ago
      Yep, and there are so many of these examples, as you said - most SMBs. But I know also more recent companies having it similarly. On the other hand - we did recently pitche some brand new RAG for TBs of complex schematics for a company in the Netherlands, and guess what - they didn't like the enterprise rates that the middleman offered, not because they did not like the demo (which they loved absolutely), and not because it was late or incomplete (it took less than a month). Had I approached this company directly, with normal rates, I would be deploying it in production already. It's very telling, and not good news for large SAAS vendors.
jackdoe 9mo ago
First slowly then all at once. [1] [1]: https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/software-application/ https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/software-applic...
- wwfn 9mo ago
  That looks demonstrative! For those that don't want to click, from Aug to Feb S&P is up 10%. "Software - Applications" is down 21%. But in this context, is Uber[9% weight, down ~4% YTD] a transportation company that roles it's own software for competitive advantage? I think other's in the composition are similar. The takeaway is maybe that the tech landscape is changing or LLMs have spooked investors and they're running without direction. But that doesn't necessarily speak to bespoke software uptake (already) cutting into profits(?) Uber would be fine in that case?
nkapias 9mo ago
I'm the main dev in a small IT company, my backlog is filled with requests, it's not always easy to prioritize and plan, some of those small projects are ignored for months, yet their business value are sound. I've observed a new trend, managers who are frequently in the wait list started to use AI to generate small local apps. They still rely on my input when it's complex, or when implementation could generate risks or need resilience and would ask for small code reviews when they are unsure of the generated code quality. The result is win win, I have more time for high value projects the executives want to prioritize, and managers can innovate faster almost on their own.
- makerdiety 9mo ago
  That sounds good enough for me.
- kayo_20211030 9mo ago
  How do these managers deploy the code? Is it run locally, or sent to some server? Excel used to be, and probably still is, the primary competitor to enterprise-developed apps - a lot of businesses run on it. But, that was a locally deployed phenomenon, with an added ability to deploy it somewhere else by simply emailing the workbook to someone else. In your organization, how do your managers turn their code into working software?
  - nkapias 9mo ago
    All platforms have their own known single way to deploy, they give the documentation to AI as constraints. Some users with privileged access can run their app locally in cli or browser, else most softwares we work with can use custom modules in specific languages (html, css, js, dax, vb.net, perl, python, sql, etc.). Ownership and trust must be established, for example only the commercial manager has access to deploy modules to CRM. They usually are constrained to read access, unless they are informed engineering managers. Ideally I would share pipelines to deploy static pages, or a predefined dynamic architecture. I'm wary the security risks are too great, I don't trust they would have enough time / interest to become autonomous in unconstrained environments so I didn't pursue the idea, maybe I could for static pages, or in isolated networks ..
haunter 9mo ago
> rather than downloading potentially malicious and foreign code So I shouldn't download and use this right? I can't verify if it's potentially malicious or not
- larodi 9mo ago
  I meant random gh repos really here, though same argument stands for SAAS which is very very very much interested in your data, and you have exactly zero guarantees and control over what happens to it once ingested. Like - GDPR exists not to protect users, but to enforce anonymization of the data that is then going to be aggregated and sold. Now imagine my not-so-complext ERP or internal system - can be developed with little or no effort. Why would I give Benioff my dollars rather than spend it on in-house assets, that also increase the valuation of my company? I find very little reason to do so in 2026.
dv_dt 9mo ago
I think some the prevalence of AI is actually turning the bias on this. It would actually be a return to the roots of the start of early business computing - and sort of picking up where excel et al left off. I don't think it's AI the tech itself, it's the confidence for companies to build a customized software stack and maintain it is what AI mostly contributes.
- globular-toast 9mo ago
  Curious how AI is giving people the confidence that they can maintain custom software. Is this Dunning-Kruger at work? It gives me great confidence in being able to stand up a new system, but as someone who has maintained software and databases for 5+ years it gives me nightmares about future maintainability. Companies have always been able to hire software engineers as well. At least that's my impression in the UK. Is this different in other parts? Not enough engineers left after big tech has hired them all?
DrScientist 9mo ago
I think the real question here isn't whether roll your own software will replace large complex 'configurable' systems, but whether companies that roll their own will replace the companies that don't. ie are the efficiency gains of having something that's exactly tailored to you enough to create a competitive advantage. It's back to the old idea - of software eating the world. So for example in the UK - there is a relatively new 'energy' company called Octopus - it's grown and grown and finally overtaken the old established players. In reality it's not an energy company - it's a software company - that used it's expertise in software to overtake it's energy supplier competitors - it was able to provide innovative products in the market because it controlled it's own software - rather than 'big vendor says no'. I think it's telling that the founder originally left school at 16 to write computer games, before coming back to do a degree etc. ie the question is - for any particular industry what's the benefit of custom software. Does a bakery having it's own give it enough of an advantage?
- arethuza 9mo ago
  I'm a bit bitter about Octopus, although they did rescue us from the horrors of our previous supplier their insistence on us getting "smart" meters that can't then function as smart meters because of poor signal and are actually more difficult to read than our old meters has left me not hugely impressed with them.
  - DrScientist 9mo ago
    Wasn't the smart meter rollout ( and the poor choice of hardware etc ) a central government initiative. Octopus merely used their software agility to make the most of it. ie not sure issues with the smart meters themselves is the fault of Octopus - as the meter standards are set centrally so they can still work if you switch supplier? Back to another old adage, "people who are really serious about software should make their own hardware"
    - arethuza 9mo ago
      Octopus pressured us into getting smart meters and they're the folks I am speaking to to get the things to work so as far as I'm concerned they're on the hook. Mind you, I couldn't help noticing that the meters themselves are owned by a leasing company... (there is a plate on each one explaining this).
tantalor 9mo ago
I'll down vote just for the whiny attitude and superior tone.
- larodi 9mo ago
  [flagged]
  - tantalor 9mo ago
    > Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - jasondigitized 9mo ago
    Na, I hear it too.
  - dandellion 9mo ago
    No, it's exactly how the words you typed, the order that you put them in and where you placed the commas reads like. I'm not even a native speaker and I still noticed.
xtiansimon 9mo ago
> “…big ERP service providers selling you SAAS.” My work uses these services and it’s interesting to see the divide between companies who have documented APIs (some also with “marketplaces”), and others who have many thousands of dollars partnerships license requirements to get API access. Or companies who are very restrictive about what they will let you do with their API, presumably in an effort to control the ecosystem around their products—whether it’s because they fear being open would devalue their product, or they have a strong notion of their market position and won’t admit any integration which upsets their governance.
- y-curious 9mo ago
  Do you work in the healthcare space? Sounds like my issues
  - xtiansimon 9mo ago
    In another life I could have. There was an interesting professional course on healthcare systems at a local university, Hofstra. But it was all MS, and I only wanted to work with OSS. No. I’m in financial sector, accounting.
calvinmorrison 9mo ago
I think ERP providers should continue to exist. It's hard to vibe code financial/accounting specs and there's the IBM factor. There are a bunch of weird ways you can get things wrong. An ERP has an established workflow that follows GAAP principles. Hundreds of thousands of customers have cut their teeth on that workflow and improvements are metered out. The last thing you want is to have to do PCI compliance or 1099 reporting, tax calculations for every jurisdiction. IFRS, Inventory valuation methods, SOX controls, revenue recognition rules, etc. Not to mention if you get audited saying "Oh yeah we vibe-reconcilled all those statements". Anything that touches the ERP? sure. If you re-design ERPs for total AI? Maybe actual ledgers (no - not tables in MSSQL), imdepotency, rollbacks, maybe. still a bad idea. Don't roll your own crypto. Don't roll your own ERP. Roll everything else around it.
- larodi 9mo ago
  > I think ERP providers should continue to exist. It's hard to vibe code financial/accounting specs Perhaps you would agree that in 2026 it is fairly easy it is to actually agentically-dev a very decent ERP given one has the blueprints such as value stream diagrams, caps, BPMNs, domain models, seq. diagrams, state diagrams and... basically a complete SRS bundle. I doubt this person even needs to be super technical to deploy it. Does it require that you use large (or small) SAAS? I guess not. It requires one understands business architecture and know-how related to the application of such mental tools. Traditionally it requires someone (a person) implementing these, translating them into code. Well this is precisely what LLM agentic systems do - translation. And they do it much cheaper with much shorter dev.cycles. And tailored also.
  - calvinmorrison 9mo ago
    I don't think you need a SaaS. I think you need an ERP.
    - larodi 9mo ago
      Point made was about SaaS companies selling ERP in the general sense. Otherwise I agree - nosy of the times SMBs don’t need SaaS.
globular-toast 9mo ago
I've been writing custom and very specific software for a business for the past 7 years. They looked into off the shelf solutions but decided it was cheaper to build in house. If what you predict is true then the sheer amount of software is going to explode. Good for people who actually understand how it all works!
ericmcer 9mo ago
I don't think it will ever really happen because of ownership. Sure this is awesome now and maybe he shipped it in a week using AI or something, but he now owns a critical part of his wife's business. 5 years from now he is gonna be working 50/hrs a week and not want to deal with this project he barely remembers even doing, whenever an SSL cert goes bad or the CC he was paying the server bills with expires or actual bugs happen he is on the line for it. It is lame to let family/friends pay $20/mo for something you could build in a few weeks, but they will own the product forever, I don't want to.
- nobody_r_knows 9mo ago
  I wonder if a very simple moltbot can do the ongoing development on its own. I mean, the hard work is mostly out of the way. This isn't so out of the realm of capability.
- newswasboring 9mo ago
  It doesn't have to be this messy. If I were the maker I would treat this as a good first version and transfer the ownership to the business slowly. This is just like working with any consultant.
  - yunohn 9mo ago
    The business is run by his wife, and if they had a SWE(-like) already, that person would’ve made this. But instead, the husband did and now owns it. He also open sourced it, so he has to live with the inevitable consequences of that too.
- bdcravens 9mo ago
  Many times we're already on the hook anyways, supporting friends/family even when they are using someone else's product.
- k1rd 9mo ago
  in 5 years whatever ai tools will be good enough to have ownership of a critical piece of software that was built now by ai.
pinewurst 9mo ago
As if the AI generated slop isn't downloading potentially malicious and foreign code.
bs7280 9mo ago
This point on security is great point that I have not fully appreciated until now. I have been telling people that my own ability to use claude code has been a game changer for what sort of tools I will or will not pay for or use. This includes random self host services. For personal use, those making their own software will still be a minority for a while, but at my job we are seeing potential to save $1M-$10M a year by rolling a custom tool vs paying for a commercial one. The saving here come from the tool doing a better job, not the license we pay.
nolroz 9mo ago
Dude. Stay on topic.

by larodi 9mo ago

deofoo 9mo ago

100%

ramshanker 9mo ago

Not just that, previously many orgs outsourced to consultancy, now when the consultancies also start outsourcing to AI, sooner all business may cut the middleman and have inhouse it teams outsourcing work to AI instead of consultancies !

lelanthran 9mo ago

> Which as a tendency threatens ALL clumsy big ERP service providers selling you SAAS. Wait, what? The big ERP vendors aren't under any threat, the small ones are. No business is going to switch from a system that has armies of low-paid consultants to in house AI developed system that has effectively zero consultants who can come in and perform the deployment with tested integrations to their accounting system, their 200 suppliers, their customer systems and their 3rd party auditing systems. But, small businesses who were not going with a 12m contract for 5 consultants, and who dont have any need for integrations to suppliers, customers and 3rd party systems can do their own systems. It sounds like you are very far removed from ERP and business systems in general. All magnetic coding is going to do is further entrench existing large systems because new systems, whether AI generated or not, will be too numerous for any one of them to gain traction.

mschild 9mo ago
> No business is going to switch from a system that has armies of low-paid consultants to in house AI developed system Are you sure about that? Because thats exactly what Klarna is doing/has done. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1957789124930286065.html?utm_source=tldrfintech https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1957789124930286065.html?...
- lelanthran 9mo ago
  > Are you sure about that? Because thats exactly what Klarna is doing/has done. That link does not say that they are switching away from a system that requires armies of consultants to implement. AFAICT, they are switching away from Jira (Atlassian/confluence products). Those are not ERP systems. Once again, I must point out that the these sorts of assertions reveal that the person making the assertion has never been involved in an ERP rollout, neither a big one nor a small one. And, again, I reiterate, the only threat is to small players in the market, who don't have a community to hire from. Because to become a big player, you need to gain traction as a small player, and if every small ERP system can be replaced with an AI generated system, non single one is ever going to gain traction (Why pay $10/user/month for a basic system when you can have AI generate that for a once of fee and some employee time?)
  - mschild 9mo ago
    Workday is not an ERP? Beyond that, they're effectively replacing major stacks of traditional SaaS tools with in-house ones. Considering the scale and complexity of what Klarna does and the regulations it has to follow across many different markts, I'd say its a valid concern. Now, I don't think SAP etc are going anywhere, especially in traditional businesses where most of the company is reliant on it, but it seems there is a way to do it. That said, plenty of banks still run on mainframes and use COBOL. https://www.salesforceben.com/klarna-salesforce-workday-partnership-called-off-amidst-major-gen-ai-overhaul/ https://www.salesforceben.com/klarna-salesforce-workday-part...
    - lelanthran 9mo ago
      Well lets see how it works out for them - they're ending the partnership for HR software in order to build their own, but they say they haven't built anything yet!
RobinL 9mo ago
My wife's old company, a fairly significant engineering consultancy, ran it's entire time/job management and invoicing system from a company wide, custom developed Microsoft Access app called 'Time'. It was developed by a single guy in the IT department and she liked it. About 5 years ago the company was acquired, and they had to move to their COTS 'enterprise' system (Maconomy). All staff from the old company had to do a week long (!) training course in how to use this and she hates it. In future I think there will be more things like 'Time' (though presumably not MS Access based!)
- spockz 9mo ago
  I still think MS Access was awesome. In the small companies I worked it was used successfully by moderately tech savvy directors and support employees to manage ERP, license generation, invoices, etc. The most heard gripe was the concurrent access to the database file but I think that was solved by backing the forms by accessing anything over odbc. It looked terrible but also was highly functional.
  - RobinL 9mo ago
    Agreed! The first piece of software I built was a simple inventory and sales management system, around 2000. I was 16 and it was just about my first experience programming. It was for school, and I recently found the write up and was surprised how well the system worked. Ever since I've marvelled at how easy it was to build something highly functional that could incorporate complex business logic, and wished there was a more modern equivalent.
    - spockz 9mo ago
      Maybe a combination of AirTable and PowerBI/open-source alternative? Or just ms access backed by a proper database?
      - jon-wood 9mo ago
        Grist[1] is great for this stuff, at first glance its a spreadsheet but that spreadsheet is backed by a SQLite database and you can put an actual UI on top of it without leaving the tool, or you can write full blown plugins in Javascript and HTML if you need to go further than that. [1] https://www.getgrist.com/ https://www.getgrist.com/
larodi 9mo ago
> It sounds like you are very far removed from ERP and business systems in general. am I really? it sounds so many people in big ERP service providers are oblivious of the tide rising that will wash them away, because you know what - most of these companies are super pricey, super slow, very messy and tend to fail large-scale projects that cost millions? I've seen this happen personally, and I have personally, as a sole player implemented ERPs with custom inhouse software. Trust me brother, I know ERPs very well and seen hundreds of high-profile fakers that have zero knowledge of E/R, Business Architecture, and integrations, that still believe they can get away with nonsense. Hope you're not one of them.
- lelanthran 9mo ago
  > Hope you're not one of them. I've been part of enough ERP contracts to know that customers evaluate their options based on how easy it is to hire consultants on the open market. I did do quite a lot of custom software prior to AI-slop, and that market is completely destroyed with vibe-coding agents. The ERP one looks like it is simply going to further entrench the big players, because new ERPs evolve from some custom application, and once that pipeline is gone, your choices are going to be "build it yourself with no ability to hire for it" or "Go with one of the existing behemoths". My argument is that AI will remove the pipeline that leads to incumbents seeing more competition.
  - darkwater 9mo ago
    > on how easy it is to hire consultants on the open market. In the not not so distant future (5 years? 10?) that consultant market will be of people with very good process knowledge and very good prompting skills. Which might or might not be in a good part the same consultant market we have today.
newsclues 9mo ago
You think the big players aren’t going to use the new tools to massively cut employees and costs?

risyachka 9mo ago

You do realize that making software by developer for his wife means for random business is hiring a third party dev to build custom software? So still, for ransom business much cheaper and better to buy software from SaaS vendor. In this case it was better ONLY because the client is the wife of the developer. And even now, if he sells this to other businesses - it will be MUCH cheaper to buy his subscription than homebrew the same version of it - as if it starts selling it he will be adding features and support which requires time (which is money).

larodi 9mo ago
> You do realize that making software by developer for his wife means for random business is hiring a third party dev to build custom software? No, this is not true. There are so many non-technical users of Microsoft Access that run their won businesses without hiring anyone. A friend of mine had a business with an yearly turnover shy of $3M (which is small, alright) and it was running wired spreadsheets and google forms. 20 people. He never ever bought any software, and existed for more than 10 years, until his wife (yes his waifu) decided to divorce and bring the company down. Business Architecture is not so much about writing the software, sorry, we as IT professionals would love to think it is, but this is a super weak bias.
- deofoo 9mo ago
  So true, we devs are so stuck in our own bubble
- germinalphrase 9mo ago
  Almost every SMB I interact with sounds like this company. Was it founded more than 10 years ago? Probably holding the ship together with spreadsheets and email.
  - larodi 9mo ago
    Yep, and there are so many of these examples, as you said - most SMBs. But I know also more recent companies having it similarly. On the other hand - we did recently pitche some brand new RAG for TBs of complex schematics for a company in the Netherlands, and guess what - they didn't like the enterprise rates that the middleman offered, not because they did not like the demo (which they loved absolutely), and not because it was late or incomplete (it took less than a month). Had I approached this company directly, with normal rates, I would be deploying it in production already. It's very telling, and not good news for large SAAS vendors.

jackdoe 9mo ago

First slowly then all at once. [1] [1]: https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/software-application/ https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/software-applic...

wwfn 9mo ago
That looks demonstrative! For those that don't want to click, from Aug to Feb S&P is up 10%. "Software - Applications" is down 21%. But in this context, is Uber[9% weight, down ~4% YTD] a transportation company that roles it's own software for competitive advantage? I think other's in the composition are similar. The takeaway is maybe that the tech landscape is changing or LLMs have spooked investors and they're running without direction. But that doesn't necessarily speak to bespoke software uptake (already) cutting into profits(?) Uber would be fine in that case?

nkapias 9mo ago

I'm the main dev in a small IT company, my backlog is filled with requests, it's not always easy to prioritize and plan, some of those small projects are ignored for months, yet their business value are sound. I've observed a new trend, managers who are frequently in the wait list started to use AI to generate small local apps. They still rely on my input when it's complex, or when implementation could generate risks or need resilience and would ask for small code reviews when they are unsure of the generated code quality. The result is win win, I have more time for high value projects the executives want to prioritize, and managers can innovate faster almost on their own.

makerdiety 9mo ago
That sounds good enough for me.
kayo_20211030 9mo ago
How do these managers deploy the code? Is it run locally, or sent to some server? Excel used to be, and probably still is, the primary competitor to enterprise-developed apps - a lot of businesses run on it. But, that was a locally deployed phenomenon, with an added ability to deploy it somewhere else by simply emailing the workbook to someone else. In your organization, how do your managers turn their code into working software?
- nkapias 9mo ago
  All platforms have their own known single way to deploy, they give the documentation to AI as constraints. Some users with privileged access can run their app locally in cli or browser, else most softwares we work with can use custom modules in specific languages (html, css, js, dax, vb.net, perl, python, sql, etc.). Ownership and trust must be established, for example only the commercial manager has access to deploy modules to CRM. They usually are constrained to read access, unless they are informed engineering managers. Ideally I would share pipelines to deploy static pages, or a predefined dynamic architecture. I'm wary the security risks are too great, I don't trust they would have enough time / interest to become autonomous in unconstrained environments so I didn't pursue the idea, maybe I could for static pages, or in isolated networks ..

haunter 9mo ago

> rather than downloading potentially malicious and foreign code So I shouldn't download and use this right? I can't verify if it's potentially malicious or not

larodi 9mo ago
I meant random gh repos really here, though same argument stands for SAAS which is very very very much interested in your data, and you have exactly zero guarantees and control over what happens to it once ingested. Like - GDPR exists not to protect users, but to enforce anonymization of the data that is then going to be aggregated and sold. Now imagine my not-so-complext ERP or internal system - can be developed with little or no effort. Why would I give Benioff my dollars rather than spend it on in-house assets, that also increase the valuation of my company? I find very little reason to do so in 2026.

dv_dt 9mo ago

I think some the prevalence of AI is actually turning the bias on this. It would actually be a return to the roots of the start of early business computing - and sort of picking up where excel et al left off. I don't think it's AI the tech itself, it's the confidence for companies to build a customized software stack and maintain it is what AI mostly contributes.

globular-toast 9mo ago
Curious how AI is giving people the confidence that they can maintain custom software. Is this Dunning-Kruger at work? It gives me great confidence in being able to stand up a new system, but as someone who has maintained software and databases for 5+ years it gives me nightmares about future maintainability. Companies have always been able to hire software engineers as well. At least that's my impression in the UK. Is this different in other parts? Not enough engineers left after big tech has hired them all?

DrScientist 9mo ago

I think the real question here isn't whether roll your own software will replace large complex 'configurable' systems, but whether companies that roll their own will replace the companies that don't. ie are the efficiency gains of having something that's exactly tailored to you enough to create a competitive advantage. It's back to the old idea - of software eating the world. So for example in the UK - there is a relatively new 'energy' company called Octopus - it's grown and grown and finally overtaken the old established players. In reality it's not an energy company - it's a software company - that used it's expertise in software to overtake it's energy supplier competitors - it was able to provide innovative products in the market because it controlled it's own software - rather than 'big vendor says no'. I think it's telling that the founder originally left school at 16 to write computer games, before coming back to do a degree etc. ie the question is - for any particular industry what's the benefit of custom software. Does a bakery having it's own give it enough of an advantage?

arethuza 9mo ago
I'm a bit bitter about Octopus, although they did rescue us from the horrors of our previous supplier their insistence on us getting "smart" meters that can't then function as smart meters because of poor signal and are actually more difficult to read than our old meters has left me not hugely impressed with them.
- DrScientist 9mo ago
  Wasn't the smart meter rollout ( and the poor choice of hardware etc ) a central government initiative. Octopus merely used their software agility to make the most of it. ie not sure issues with the smart meters themselves is the fault of Octopus - as the meter standards are set centrally so they can still work if you switch supplier? Back to another old adage, "people who are really serious about software should make their own hardware"
  - arethuza 9mo ago
    Octopus pressured us into getting smart meters and they're the folks I am speaking to to get the things to work so as far as I'm concerned they're on the hook. Mind you, I couldn't help noticing that the meters themselves are owned by a leasing company... (there is a plate on each one explaining this).

tantalor 9mo ago

I'll down vote just for the whiny attitude and superior tone.

larodi 9mo ago
[flagged]
- tantalor 9mo ago
  > Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- jasondigitized 9mo ago
  Na, I hear it too.
- dandellion 9mo ago
  No, it's exactly how the words you typed, the order that you put them in and where you placed the commas reads like. I'm not even a native speaker and I still noticed.

xtiansimon 9mo ago

> “…big ERP service providers selling you SAAS.” My work uses these services and it’s interesting to see the divide between companies who have documented APIs (some also with “marketplaces”), and others who have many thousands of dollars partnerships license requirements to get API access. Or companies who are very restrictive about what they will let you do with their API, presumably in an effort to control the ecosystem around their products—whether it’s because they fear being open would devalue their product, or they have a strong notion of their market position and won’t admit any integration which upsets their governance.

y-curious 9mo ago
Do you work in the healthcare space? Sounds like my issues
- xtiansimon 9mo ago
  In another life I could have. There was an interesting professional course on healthcare systems at a local university, Hofstra. But it was all MS, and I only wanted to work with OSS. No. I’m in financial sector, accounting.

calvinmorrison 9mo ago

I think ERP providers should continue to exist. It's hard to vibe code financial/accounting specs and there's the IBM factor. There are a bunch of weird ways you can get things wrong. An ERP has an established workflow that follows GAAP principles. Hundreds of thousands of customers have cut their teeth on that workflow and improvements are metered out. The last thing you want is to have to do PCI compliance or 1099 reporting, tax calculations for every jurisdiction. IFRS, Inventory valuation methods, SOX controls, revenue recognition rules, etc. Not to mention if you get audited saying "Oh yeah we vibe-reconcilled all those statements". Anything that touches the ERP? sure. If you re-design ERPs for total AI? Maybe actual ledgers (no - not tables in MSSQL), imdepotency, rollbacks, maybe. still a bad idea. Don't roll your own crypto. Don't roll your own ERP. Roll everything else around it.

larodi 9mo ago
> I think ERP providers should continue to exist. It's hard to vibe code financial/accounting specs Perhaps you would agree that in 2026 it is fairly easy it is to actually agentically-dev a very decent ERP given one has the blueprints such as value stream diagrams, caps, BPMNs, domain models, seq. diagrams, state diagrams and... basically a complete SRS bundle. I doubt this person even needs to be super technical to deploy it. Does it require that you use large (or small) SAAS? I guess not. It requires one understands business architecture and know-how related to the application of such mental tools. Traditionally it requires someone (a person) implementing these, translating them into code. Well this is precisely what LLM agentic systems do - translation. And they do it much cheaper with much shorter dev.cycles. And tailored also.
- calvinmorrison 9mo ago
  I don't think you need a SaaS. I think you need an ERP.
  - larodi 9mo ago
    Point made was about SaaS companies selling ERP in the general sense. Otherwise I agree - nosy of the times SMBs don’t need SaaS.

globular-toast 9mo ago

I've been writing custom and very specific software for a business for the past 7 years. They looked into off the shelf solutions but decided it was cheaper to build in house. If what you predict is true then the sheer amount of software is going to explode. Good for people who actually understand how it all works!

ericmcer 9mo ago

I don't think it will ever really happen because of ownership. Sure this is awesome now and maybe he shipped it in a week using AI or something, but he now owns a critical part of his wife's business. 5 years from now he is gonna be working 50/hrs a week and not want to deal with this project he barely remembers even doing, whenever an SSL cert goes bad or the CC he was paying the server bills with expires or actual bugs happen he is on the line for it. It is lame to let family/friends pay $20/mo for something you could build in a few weeks, but they will own the product forever, I don't want to.

nobody_r_knows 9mo ago
I wonder if a very simple moltbot can do the ongoing development on its own. I mean, the hard work is mostly out of the way. This isn't so out of the realm of capability.
newswasboring 9mo ago
It doesn't have to be this messy. If I were the maker I would treat this as a good first version and transfer the ownership to the business slowly. This is just like working with any consultant.
- yunohn 9mo ago
  The business is run by his wife, and if they had a SWE(-like) already, that person would’ve made this. But instead, the husband did and now owns it. He also open sourced it, so he has to live with the inevitable consequences of that too.
bdcravens 9mo ago
Many times we're already on the hook anyways, supporting friends/family even when they are using someone else's product.
k1rd 9mo ago
in 5 years whatever ai tools will be good enough to have ownership of a critical piece of software that was built now by ai.

pinewurst 9mo ago

As if the AI generated slop isn't downloading potentially malicious and foreign code.

bs7280 9mo ago

This point on security is great point that I have not fully appreciated until now. I have been telling people that my own ability to use claude code has been a game changer for what sort of tools I will or will not pay for or use. This includes random self host services. For personal use, those making their own software will still be a minority for a while, but at my job we are seeing potential to save $1M-$10M a year by rolling a custom tool vs paying for a commercial one. The saving here come from the tool doing a better job, not the license we pay.

nolroz 9mo ago

Dude. Stay on topic.