5 ms·

We are certainly closer now to being able to prototype and go to market faster with a product. In one weekend is a little much but I think its hard to deny that

by mym1990 9mo ago

We are certainly closer now to being able to prototype and go to market faster with a product. In one weekend is a little much but I think its hard to deny that building will continue to expedite. What most developers don't think about is that the marketing, sales, customer service are all non-trivial parts of the business/product and all require legwork that is more than just sitting at an IDE. The nail in the coffin is that the data is a large part of company moats, and new products need time in the market to get that. Migration is also a long process and risky...so to get customers, a newcomer needs to provide way more value than what the incumbent gives. I imagine you're going to have people trying to automate the whole GTM lifecycle, but eventually the developer that thinks they can bootstrap a one man enterprise without actually doing any kind of social interaction will run into a wall.

re-thc 9mo ago
> We are certainly closer now to being able to prototype and go to market faster with a product. Prototype maybe. Go to market maybe not so. It's giving false hope. You're just taking more shortcuts with prototyping.
risyachka 9mo ago
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.
- icedchai 9mo ago
  Yep. Wait until they realize one of their vibe coded apps validates everything client side and their entire DB is open to the world.
  - scotty79 9mo ago
    Like that never happened with non-vibecoded stuff.
    - icedchai 9mo ago
      Of course it has, but it's more likely to happen when nobody is paying attention.
    - habinero 9mo ago
      There's a difference between someone breaking into your house to steal your valuables, and you getting robbed after leaving your valuables on your lawn with a sign saying "Look At My Valuables"
      - scotty79 9mo ago
        Startups of the last decade were routinely doing this. Building their fresh ideas on the newfangled databse without bothering to investigste how to secure it in any way against malicious actors.
- AlienRobot 9mo ago
  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 a bug and you charge someone without delivering anything? How do you prevent fraud? How do you handle disputes? Someone posted something illegal. What do you do in this situation? Do you call the police? The FBI? What kind of data do you give the authorities? How much data SHOULD you have been logging in the first place in case something like this happens? One user doesn't like you so he bought a botnet to DDoS your website. How do you handle this? Are they mass posting? Mass creating accounts? Is it possible for them to exhaust all the usernames possible and then nobody can create an account anymore? Your website is online but if the server blows up you'll lose all the data in the database. You need backups. You need a system to ensure the backups are actually working. But then some guy from the UK said he wants his posts all deleted. What are you going to do now, because his posts are also in the backups, and you don't want to touch those. Trolls are posting things against the ToS. Who handles these things? Shadowban? So there needs to be a shadowban system? Moderators? So there needs to be a moderator-only section of the website? Should this be integrated with the main website or not? Then you look at this horrendous mess of 6 paragraphs and you think back about the first paragraph that already did everything you wanted from Twitter. All these other systems, most of the work, and all you actually wanted was the first paragraph.
  - groundzeros2015 9mo ago
    All those things are true. It still doesn’t sound like 1000+ engineers at 350k/yr. What actually happens in a startup is you encounter these problems one at a time as they arise.
    - risyachka 9mo ago
      Twitter wasn't built by 1000 engineers at 350k/yr. It had to hire them later on. Because when there are users - you need support, take out fires etc. And this exact thing will happen with any homebrewed SaaS. You either run a business or play tech company making your own saas instead of focusing on your business. Sure you can do both in very rare cases - if you are SpaceX or similar, otherwise you are shooting yourself in the foot.
overfeed 9mo ago
> We are certainly closer now to being able to prototype and go to market faster with a product. What are the higher-order effects when anyone can do this, and *aaS becomes a market for Lemons?
- trhway 9mo ago
  in the 90-ies anyone could easily prototype with tools like Access (and all the other "4GL" tools which were similarly all the rage back then). That still didn't preclude companies from buying their major software from software vendors instead of doing it themselves. In some sense having customer able to prototype what they want is a good thing. I did it myself as i was at the time on that side, and having a quick-whip-it tool was a good thing to quickly get some feature that was missing in the major software before that major software would add it (if at all). (And if one remembers for example Crystal Reports - while for "reports", it and the likes were in many senses such quick-whip-it tools for a lot of such customization that was doable by the customer.) So, after initial aftershock - "Ahhhh, we don't need software companies anymore!" - we'll get to the state with software companies still doing their thing just with a lot of AI as specialization is one of the main thing in modern economy and AI becomes most powerful tools of the trade. (and various AI components themselves will be part of software delivery, like say a very fine-tuned model (hosted or on-premise) specific to the customer and software - Clippy on steroids) (Of course some companies wouldn't survive the transition just like some companies didn't survive the transitions to client/server, cloud, etc. while some new companies will emerge like Anthropic has today or Borland had at the time)
  - sevensor 9mo ago
    Access is not as dead as you might hope. The long tail of internal tools written with Access continues to shamble along. I had to figure out how to dump MDB files on Windows last year for just this reason. As an industry I think we often fail to grasp how much outsider art there is, in the form of internal departmental tools. LLM coding is going to create a cambrian explosion of these tools. It’s going to be very interesting to see the remnants of this wave 30 years down the line.
Aperocky 9mo ago
> bootstrap a one man enterprise without actually doing any kind of social interaction will run into a wall. But you are not limited to only using LLM for coding. I agree that marketing and sales is as important as product and technology, but they are not necessarily safe.
mvkel 9mo ago
> We are certainly closer now to being able to prototype and go to market faster with a product Absolutely. But this begs the question that businesses want to also sign up to maintain whatever product they've built, on top of their core business. "Service" is the word that people seem to be forgetting in SaaS. If you roll you own, all you have is software.
- mym1990 9mo ago
  The "service" part can still come from internal sources. Plenty of companies have internal support for internal tooling. With a good foundation of infrastructure and a lean team that knows how to build, not just vibe code, there is most definitely some ROI there. But yes, this brings us back to the point that simply building the tool is only a small part of the process...and it has often been one of the most expensive parts of the process.
Nathanba 9mo ago
I sure hope I never have to hunt down any GTM options myself soon and I can tell the AI to do what it should be doing. However AI adoption may be getting slowed down by profit motives because what Google should have already been doing is letting me git clone the entirety of GTM with all its configs to a local folder so I can treat it like code because it is code. The difficulty with AI adoption will be to make all products be like this so they can interact on a code level instead of me having to press buttons in different UIs to make thing shappen. E.g cloudflare should be letting me git clone its entire config, everything I did in the dashboard, to my folder too.

by mym1990 9mo ago

re-thc 9mo ago

> We are certainly closer now to being able to prototype and go to market faster with a product. Prototype maybe. Go to market maybe not so. It's giving false hope. You're just taking more shortcuts with prototyping.

risyachka 9mo ago

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.

icedchai 9mo ago
Yep. Wait until they realize one of their vibe coded apps validates everything client side and their entire DB is open to the world.
- scotty79 9mo ago
  Like that never happened with non-vibecoded stuff.
  - icedchai 9mo ago
    Of course it has, but it's more likely to happen when nobody is paying attention.
  - habinero 9mo ago
    There's a difference between someone breaking into your house to steal your valuables, and you getting robbed after leaving your valuables on your lawn with a sign saying "Look At My Valuables"
    - scotty79 9mo ago
      Startups of the last decade were routinely doing this. Building their fresh ideas on the newfangled databse without bothering to investigste how to secure it in any way against malicious actors.
AlienRobot 9mo ago
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 a bug and you charge someone without delivering anything? How do you prevent fraud? How do you handle disputes? Someone posted something illegal. What do you do in this situation? Do you call the police? The FBI? What kind of data do you give the authorities? How much data SHOULD you have been logging in the first place in case something like this happens? One user doesn't like you so he bought a botnet to DDoS your website. How do you handle this? Are they mass posting? Mass creating accounts? Is it possible for them to exhaust all the usernames possible and then nobody can create an account anymore? Your website is online but if the server blows up you'll lose all the data in the database. You need backups. You need a system to ensure the backups are actually working. But then some guy from the UK said he wants his posts all deleted. What are you going to do now, because his posts are also in the backups, and you don't want to touch those. Trolls are posting things against the ToS. Who handles these things? Shadowban? So there needs to be a shadowban system? Moderators? So there needs to be a moderator-only section of the website? Should this be integrated with the main website or not? Then you look at this horrendous mess of 6 paragraphs and you think back about the first paragraph that already did everything you wanted from Twitter. All these other systems, most of the work, and all you actually wanted was the first paragraph.
- groundzeros2015 9mo ago
  All those things are true. It still doesn’t sound like 1000+ engineers at 350k/yr. What actually happens in a startup is you encounter these problems one at a time as they arise.
  - risyachka 9mo ago
    Twitter wasn't built by 1000 engineers at 350k/yr. It had to hire them later on. Because when there are users - you need support, take out fires etc. And this exact thing will happen with any homebrewed SaaS. You either run a business or play tech company making your own saas instead of focusing on your business. Sure you can do both in very rare cases - if you are SpaceX or similar, otherwise you are shooting yourself in the foot.

overfeed 9mo ago

> We are certainly closer now to being able to prototype and go to market faster with a product. What are the higher-order effects when anyone can do this, and *aaS becomes a market for Lemons?

trhway 9mo ago
in the 90-ies anyone could easily prototype with tools like Access (and all the other "4GL" tools which were similarly all the rage back then). That still didn't preclude companies from buying their major software from software vendors instead of doing it themselves. In some sense having customer able to prototype what they want is a good thing. I did it myself as i was at the time on that side, and having a quick-whip-it tool was a good thing to quickly get some feature that was missing in the major software before that major software would add it (if at all). (And if one remembers for example Crystal Reports - while for "reports", it and the likes were in many senses such quick-whip-it tools for a lot of such customization that was doable by the customer.) So, after initial aftershock - "Ahhhh, we don't need software companies anymore!" - we'll get to the state with software companies still doing their thing just with a lot of AI as specialization is one of the main thing in modern economy and AI becomes most powerful tools of the trade. (and various AI components themselves will be part of software delivery, like say a very fine-tuned model (hosted or on-premise) specific to the customer and software - Clippy on steroids) (Of course some companies wouldn't survive the transition just like some companies didn't survive the transitions to client/server, cloud, etc. while some new companies will emerge like Anthropic has today or Borland had at the time)
- sevensor 9mo ago
  Access is not as dead as you might hope. The long tail of internal tools written with Access continues to shamble along. I had to figure out how to dump MDB files on Windows last year for just this reason. As an industry I think we often fail to grasp how much outsider art there is, in the form of internal departmental tools. LLM coding is going to create a cambrian explosion of these tools. It’s going to be very interesting to see the remnants of this wave 30 years down the line.

Aperocky 9mo ago

> bootstrap a one man enterprise without actually doing any kind of social interaction will run into a wall. But you are not limited to only using LLM for coding. I agree that marketing and sales is as important as product and technology, but they are not necessarily safe.

mvkel 9mo ago

> We are certainly closer now to being able to prototype and go to market faster with a product Absolutely. But this begs the question that businesses want to also sign up to maintain whatever product they've built, on top of their core business. "Service" is the word that people seem to be forgetting in SaaS. If you roll you own, all you have is software.

mym1990 9mo ago
The "service" part can still come from internal sources. Plenty of companies have internal support for internal tooling. With a good foundation of infrastructure and a lean team that knows how to build, not just vibe code, there is most definitely some ROI there. But yes, this brings us back to the point that simply building the tool is only a small part of the process...and it has often been one of the most expensive parts of the process.

Nathanba 9mo ago

I sure hope I never have to hunt down any GTM options myself soon and I can tell the AI to do what it should be doing. However AI adoption may be getting slowed down by profit motives because what Google should have already been doing is letting me git clone the entirety of GTM with all its configs to a local folder so I can treat it like code because it is code. The difficulty with AI adoption will be to make all products be like this so they can interact on a code level instead of me having to press buttons in different UIs to make thing shappen. E.g cloudflare should be letting me git clone its entire config, everything I did in the dashboard, to my folder too.