26 ms·

The Sideprocalypse

158 points by headalgorithm 8mo ago

0x303 8mo ago
I don't disagree with the sentiment, but it's a depressing take to say that the best approach for self-preservation is to latch hard onto corporate
- Anonyneko 8mo ago
  I feel like that isn't even anything new, most businesses have worked like that for a long time. It's much more straightforward to be a supplier for a few big clients than to be a B2C. We just don't hear about them as often because of their nature.
debo_ 8mo ago
On the flipside, there are a lot of businesses that don't open their digital product to multiple markets or verticals because the cost (in money or focus) is too high. Distribution just got a lot easier, arguably about as easy as it should have been in the first place. If you already have a reasonable moat for your product in a smallish market, going broad is a lot more feasible now. I'm doing it now (with partners who own the core product) and its going very well.
alangibson 8mo ago
I got out of software and into physical products a couple of years ago. I wish I could say I was prescient, but honestly it's just so much easier to sell physical items. Margins are worse, but selling is easier. If you've got a thing you can be sure that someone somewhere will give you money for it.
- 7777332215 8mo ago
  What kind of physical products and what kind of customers?
  - alangibson 8mo ago
    airtite.shop Stuff for old men like me
- alex_suzuki 8mo ago
  But… distribution is so much harder?
  - alangibson 8mo ago
    There's legions of companies that will do warehousing and shipping for you. Definitely costs though. That's what I mean by margins being a significant difference.
    - alex_suzuki 8mo ago
      A friend of mine dabbles in niche hardware products. The amount of work he has to put in to get the CE and other certifications is significant. That’s before assembly, shipping (including customs shenanigans) and… returns. For a software guy like me, digital products seem much less daunting… and of course they scale “perfectly”. Nice smokers though, must be nice to earn money from something like that, congrats!
- gordonhart 8mo ago
  Kind of looks like vibecoding is doing to SaaS what Chinese mass manufacturing did to physical products two decades ago. Only the marketing and distribution matter in a world where it's very easy for others to clone something and sell it at a lower price.
  - bwfan123 8mo ago
    > Only the marketing and distribution matter in a world where it's very easy for others to clone something and sell it at a lower price Great point. AI remixes and rips-off existing code-bases in a manner that is impossible to attribute copyright violation making it legal. ie, Perfect cloning. In a world where cloning is legal, the engineering cost of product drops to zero. That is where software production could be headed. What remains is marketing/distribution/sales. There will remain niches solving "hard problems" which cant be cloned, but those will be rare. Hard problems are where a lot of engineering complexity resides, involving interacting components for which there are no examples in training datasets to copy from. For example, a complex distributed system or hardware with multiple nuanced tradeoffs.
  - rithdmc 8mo ago
    > Only the marketing and distribution matter Don't forget liability & compliance :)
  - SoftTalker 8mo ago
    And yet people can still make money producing and selling high quality physical products. It's a smaller market but there are people who don't want mass produced chinese crap and they go out of their way to find it. There will be people who will pay for "human coded" software if it is better. Quality is always a differentiator that some people will pay for.
- Debeli 8mo ago
  Well, you're like then opposite version of me :D I was into physical products and services most of my life, and from recently I'm just trying to create stuff that can be sold digitally :D Still not there, but slowly getting to it.
bryanrasmussen 8mo ago
ok, but then to support him he suggests starring one of his github repos, isn't that just throwing out some breadcrumbs for the crows using his analogy?
Gud 8mo ago
“Quality is not a metric” is the core argument here. I say the only way to build a successful long term product is by focusing on quality, ESPECIALLY when the competition is shitting out crap.
- CuriouslyC 8mo ago
  Quality buys you user retention/longevity. You can't retain users you don't have though, and getting users now is brutal.
  - Gud 8mo ago
    Getting users was always brutal
  - pixl97 8mo ago
    Features get users, but features introduce complexity, bugs, technical debt, and maintenance expenses. More so this complexity requires that you have support for your users, and QA of weird functional interactions across systems boundaries that you just can't test for when actually writing the code. This gets expensive really fast. Complex software is hard, yo.
- icedchai 8mo ago
  I totally agree here. AI coding is raising the ceiling in terms of code quantity, but it also lowers the floor on quality, right into the sewer. Fortunately experienced developers are in the best position to use these tools properly, evaluate what works and what doesn't. We might drown in slop first though.
dave_sid 8mo ago
I think what is left is that understanding pain points and knowing what problems needs solved is more important now than ever. If anyone can create a product now then the one who knows what product to actually create is the winner. And who might this be? Well it might just be the people who spent the last 10 years speaking to customers, building a SaaS. They have 10 years of taking to customers finding out what to build. Even if they were to start from scratch today they already have the requirements in their pocket. The game has change. The ‘how’ we build it is easy. The ‘what’ we build is and always has been the hardest part of any SaaS or business.
- habitable5 8mo ago
  > The game has change. The ‘how’ we build it is easy. The ‘what’ we build is and always has been the hardest part of any SaaS or business. This is what the promptfondlers don't want to admit: the how has been easy for a long time. This last, I dunno, 35 years or so, Visual Basic, Delphi, whatnot, producing code has been very easy. You don't need a fundamentally fascist probabilistic nightmare to do it. The hard problems are indeed is "what" to build and how we maintain it. There's only hype. There's no results. https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware-why-ai-coding https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware... As for fascism, check https://blog.bgcarlisle.com/2025/05/16/a-plausible-scalable-and-slightly-wrong-black-box-why-large-language-models-are-a-fascist-technology-that-cannot-be-redeemed/ https://blog.bgcarlisle.com/2025/05/16/a-plausible-scalable-... for example > By “fascist” in this context, I mean that it is well suited to centralizing authority, eliminating checks on that authority and advancing an anti-science agenda. Or check Woodrow Hartzog & Jessica Silbey, How AI Destroys Institutions , 77 UC Law Journal (2026). Available at: https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/faculty_scholarship/4179 https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/faculty_scholarship/4179
  - tonyedgecombe 8mo ago
    > This last, I dunno, 35 years or so, Visual Basic, Delphi, whatnot, producing code has been very easy I’m not so sure about that. It’s very easy to take your own knowledge for granted. Most people can’t do what we do. Most of my customers couldn’t even express what they wanted.
chasd00 8mo ago
I wish i could take back the view i gave to this article, it says nothing. Is there such a thing as an inverse hype machine? Where people take the opposite side of a hyped product and then hype that view just as much but for the same purpose? His footer even admits he's basically just trolling for views so he can reach the status of "thought leader". btw, someone else having the same idea you have for a saas company has always been the case forever. Individuals taking shortcuts in quality to get to market faster has also been the case forever. There's nothing new about either of those two things.
- arkensaw 8mo ago
  Exactly. If someone pitched you a book about a young kid who goes to a school of magic to learn how to use his powers, makes friends and enemies and ultimately battles evil, you might shoot down their dreams because "some cocaine-addled sales critter" already had that idea, and she's called J K Rowling and she's worth billions and shes so successful she can't even be cancelled because she makes so much money. And yet, Patrick Rothfuss's The Name Of The Wind is the same concept, and sold over a million copes, Lev Grossman's The Magicians is again the same concept, sold millions, and was adapted into a 5 season TV series for SyFy. If anything, the success of an idea only leads to a bigger appetite for that idea. Google was not the first search engine.
  - pixl97 8mo ago
    > book about a young kid who goes to a school of magic to learn how to use his powers Add to this the 50 bajillion manga/anime's with the exact same trope.
  - amarant 8mo ago
    Ot to the article, but I just feel I need to strongly recommend The Hierarchy by James Islington. It's pretty much the same idea as the above titles but omg it's so well written. Absolute must read!
    - arkensaw 8mo ago
      oh thanks, I'll check that out! BTW, The Magicians TV series might be the best thing SyFy ever made. It's got so much heart, it's properly funny, it's creative, it's epic despite a shoestring budget, and the characters stay with you long after you finish.
simpaticoder 8mo ago
>Yours actually works and is higher quality, because you know about things like TTFP and INP and "not putting your Supabase god-token in the client"? Oh, you sweet summer child: I take no pleasure in this but I need to tell you that these things don't matter anymore. Quality is not a metric anyone cares about in 2026. Quality will matter the most in 2026. Specifically because the barrier-to-entry for making software is down there will of course be a lot of poor quality software, which will break, expose customer data, be bloated, etc. Customers will have more options, and this will allow them to be more discerning. Open source, clean code, low dependencies...these are things that can be evaluated by HN crowd types, but it's also something that an LLM can evaluate. We are entering into an age of software taste. For those of us that have developed taste over the years, we become the taste makers in that we care how things are built, and know what we're looking for. This applies on the supply side, when our taste drives the LLM, and on the consumption side, when we can help the masses evaluate what to use and what not to use. NB: this is all speculation expressed as fact, in keeping with the OP's style.
- lelanthran 8mo ago
  > Customers will have more options, and this will allow them to be more discerning. Lets assume this is true - how on earth are they to determine that your code doesn't have any glaring security holes but the 2h vibe-coded app has more holes than the Swiss is able to put into their cheese[1]? I really want to know how customers can tell the difference between very pretty crap and your stuff? ------------- [1] Yeah, I know it doesn't work like that.
  - pixl97 8mo ago
    Yep, choice can paralyze. What these customers are going to do is do a summary discard of almost all the choices but say 3 to 5 and go from there. The problem is now how to be consistently on that top list. And that's marketing's problem.
- ileonichwiesz 8mo ago
  Just like the tide of fast fashion caused people to seek out local-sewn clothes made from high-quality materials, right? Right? Quality isn’t a differentiator if the market is saturated with indistinguishable garbage. Everything is made in sweatshops out of the cheapest plastic available, and I don’t see why software isn’t next in line.
CuriouslyC 8mo ago
This vibes with me, though I think it's overly glum. You can't hope to succeed by building something cool without distribution already figured out. If you haven't put the work in building a social following, you're pretty much locked into pay to play (which isn't horrible if you target small targeted bloggers/youtubers/etc, but it's not my bag). OpenClaw exploded because Peter has >100k twitter followers and among them are plenty of people who themselves have a ton of followers. So, if you're building, you also need to focus on building an audience. The high touch enterprise sales strategy is solid though, and easier to bootstrap. That's why Alex Hormozi and Dan Martell push people getting started that way.
tjansen 8mo ago
Maybe it's wishful thinking, being one of the SaaS-developing developers he describes. But I think that only the complexity required for a SaaS is increasing. You certainly can't earn millions with the kind of SaaS that used to take a week or two, and can now be done on a weekend. So I am trying the kind of SaaS that I never dared to start, knowing that it would take a year or two of my spare time. And with AI agents, I now hope to complete it in 3 or 4 months, with a lot of extra features I would never have dared to include in an MVP.
- arkensaw 8mo ago
  do you want to tell us what it is?
  - tjansen 8mo ago
    A cloud-based RSS reader (like Google Reader, Feedly, Inoreader...).
    - arkensaw 8mo ago
      sold :)
    - hagbard_c 8mo ago
      What would distinguish your cloud-based RSS reader from the many other cloud-based RSS readers, both self-hosted as well as the others?
      - tjansen 8mo ago
        Mainly, a friendly and simple UI. Feedly looks like it hasn't gotten much love recently. Inoreader is too cluttered for my taste, though it has a feature set I can't match any time soon. I have plenty of other ideas for what to build on top of it: offering an SDK and APIs so you can vibe-code the UI you want, a built-in podcast listener, using news from aggregated feeds to build a personalized AI feed. But the first step is to reach the Google Reader feature set minus social features.
apitman 8mo ago
I think a lot of opportunities are closing. But I also think a lot of new ones are being created. Pretty much impossible to predict. AI may end up being like "the bomber will always get through": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_bomber_will_always_get_through https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_bomber_will_always_get_thr...
clickety_clack 8mo ago
This is the kind of thing that anyone could have said at any time in history. Sure, it’s easier now to solve the kinds of problems that were hard a few years ago, but that just brings whole classes of previously “impossible” problems into the merely “hard” category. We’re just finding out what those are now, and if you can figure one out there’s money to be made.
dgxyz 8mo ago
Entering the SaaS market is dead because the market is saturated with mature products, not due to anything AI related. I've watched people try and enter the market we're in and fail because they can't build enough product to take any market share from anyone else. Build something else!
bambax 8mo ago
> What's that you're saying? Yours actually works and is higher quality, because you know about things like TTFP and INP and "not putting your Supabase god-token in the client"? Oh, you sweet summer child: I take no pleasure in this but I need to tell you that these things don't matter anymore. Quality is not a metric anyone cares about in 2026. That's funny and all but it can't really be true that quality doesn't matter. It has to matter at some point. Maybe it doesn't matter during the initial sales cycle; I've seen it happen: the CEO sees a slick demo that works, every user / developper rolls their eyes and try to warn them, they don't listen, and the deal is done. But eventually if the thing that's supposed to be done, isn't, something will have to give. Even if at first they fire all the eye-rollers and replace them with obedient corporate drones, if the think isn't working and it's on the critical path, it will have to be replaced by something that actually does work.
buffalobuffalo 8mo ago
So nobody will ever start another successful software project? People will, what, just stop creating software? I understand people's apprehension because of the pace of change, but this is just silly.
- ForHackernews 8mo ago
  You're overstating the case, but I think there's a strong possibility people will prompt AIs to produce bespoke apps that solve their niche use-case rather than paying a developer to do it. I pay for a SaaS app that tracks my finances, but it's not that great and missing some features I would like. Very soon I expect I'll be able to get a better, local-first replacement tailored to my needs by prompting Claude & Friends.
  - buffalobuffalo 8mo ago
    There are two big advantages to using a 3rd party system. 1) There are a lot of cases where aggregated user data, even if anonymized, allows for insights that you can't get using just your own data. 2) The software is really just a stand in for a process. A way of doing something, like record keeping or tax filing, etc. A lot of times it makes sense to follow an already established process rather than creating your own. You are less likely to encounter unexpected pitfalls that way. I don't see how you can overcome those just by having an AI that can build simple crud apps at will.
  - kvgr 8mo ago
    I think developers overestimate the amount of people who want to create app. My friends are lawyers, doctors, musicians, Pr, sales and they really dont care about creating their own apps or software. They use their iPhones for calls and Instagram.
    - SoftTalker 8mo ago
      That's kind of me. I have never purchased an app for my phone. I use what it came with: phone calls, imessage, maps, browser. That's all I need.
drchiu 8mo ago
It was never easy after ~2010.
larsiusprime 8mo ago
If I understand it, the premise of this article is that because the marginal cost of software production is now free, now nobody can compete against garbage quality code sold by the slickest "sales critter", so everyone should just give up. I mean, it seems at the very least, that open source and in-house production has a natural advantage here? If the marginal cost of software production is now free, then FOSS/in-house just got easier to create and maintain too. Does that make it easier for FOSS/in-house, both available without a subscription to an external third party, undermine "sales critter" SAAS, by the author's own premises?
- pixl97 8mo ago
  > now nobody can compete against garbage quality code sold by the slickest "sales critter", so everyone should just give up. Isn't that just SAP, er, I mean SAAS as it has been for a decade?
WarmWash 8mo ago
If dream of having a weekend-project turned $30k ARR SaaS is dead, good. It's an example of a tiny sliver of people losing their golden goose, so that everyone else in society can operate more efficiently. One guy loses $2400/mo in revenue 200 pool cleaners can now easily track their clients filter change dates without paying $12/mo for a calendar script (something that 20 years ago would have been a one time $3 purchase).
ramon156 8mo ago
Has OP been at a company where sales people do this? I have, and I can tell you they have not gotten far. There was one PM at my ex-job that showed a dashboard for... well... i honestly didnt understand. I think it was some uptime checks. It broke during his presentation. There's a company I hired at that "built an ERP in 5 days and is shipping the product in June". Same thing happened, it broke when presenting. Basic feature suggestions just returned a "Yes, we can do that!" (they meant they can tell Claude to do it, not that the product could do it). Maybe at some point non-engineers can prompt build, but for now I'd say we're pretty safe. I think engineers give themselves too little credit. Being able to read code is an amazing tool that can only be sharpened through skill. Lastly, I think I commented this ~2 years ago as well. If your product is vibe-codable and is replacing customers, it's a shit product. Similarly, if you can outsource your product on fiverr, its's a shit product.
- ramon156 8mo ago
  I wonder what the game dev side has been like with agentic coding. Starting a project from scratch is usually a boring task, so I wonder if - making a markdown file with all specs, details and plans - asking claude to search online and suggest some approaches is a better alternative to doing the research yourself.
  - d0100 8mo ago
    I haven't had much success using LLM's in Unity as there is a lot of work that goes into the editor and cannot be done via code, especially if you are using several different assets
turnsout 8mo ago
If you've ever tried to build something real with agentic AI, you know that it takes time. You can't (yet) snap your fingers and produce a fully market-viable clone of a SaaS product. The specifics matter here. If you run a CRM for Dentists, can someone replicate your product in a weekend? I'm going to guess that dentists have some esoteric needs related to their CRM, and it's a little more complicated than an outsider might guess. So what is the threat model? That a dentist is going to get fed up and try to DIY? I think you should encourage that, so they'll see what goes into it. That a 22 year old chooses "CRM for Dentists" as a thing to vibe-code over a weekend? Again, good luck with that. I really dislike this SaaSocalypse fear mongering, because it's just not based in reality. Show me five examples of established SaaS companies being wiped out by vibe coding.
mmaunder 8mo ago
Someone needs a hug. Honestly I've started writing only to realize how much code output will be wasted over the next hour or two, so I just go back to coding the amazing product I'm working on with amazing agents, that would simply not be possible if I didn't have access to the AI tools I'm using. It's going to make many humans profoundly more safe. I'm very excited. I hope you are excited about your project too.
draw_down 8mo ago
[dead]
glhast 8mo ago
SaaS let's you simply pay to make blockers go away. Now that our time is more high leverage, why wouldn't you continue to do that? Let's say you could vibe your own replacement to a $20/month app in 16 hours. Congratulations, you did work valued at an $15/hour less token expenses (over 1 year).
sealthedeal 8mo ago
AI can self direct SEO pretty good, hate to be the bearer of bad news.
Tepix 8mo ago
> "If Mastodon's not your jam, maybe star one of my GitHub repos. It's really the least you can do." I like his sense of humour.
znnajdla 8mo ago
The author seems to be complaining about the fact that you can't make a pet hobby project succeed purely out of technical excellence. First of all welcome to the club: musicians and artists and people of taste have long lived with the constant pain of watching the majority of people consume crap. Secondly: it's not true that products cannot succeed on the basis of pure technical excellence. Figma, TigerBeetle, and much software of the highest class have won the market on the basis of technical excellence, and it's the kind of thing amateurs with AI will never be able to build. You need to find an audience with a real problem and then produce a technically superior solution that an amateur with AI cannot.
sph 8mo ago
Meanwhile, in the Silicon Valley: “OpenAI should build Slack” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47012553 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47012553 Yes, a very hyped mega-corp should be building and replacing all productivity software; why leave room for competitors when a single company can do it all? What can go wrong?
bsza 8mo ago
> And they're better than you at SEO Based on Louis Rossmann's rant 3 days ago [1], it seems Gemini has got you covered on that front too. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uKZ84zwJI0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uKZ84zwJI0
wasmainiac 8mo ago
> Quality is not a metric anyone cares about in 2026. When you write operational critical code, it matters. No one can blame “the AI made me do it” when things go down and hundreds of thousands of people are without service. When your code can hurt people, it matters. You can’t burn someone’s eye with a laser then point to some AI agent when lawsuits start flying in. When millions of dollars in production data is lost or corrupted, who is responsible? Not AI. Quality matters. I keep hearing this one phrase about code quality again and again. Sure, no one cares about the dumb little linter failing your builds, but when code quality comes to responsibility, it goes hand in hand. It’s either that or your all working on hobby projects.
- calvinmorrison 8mo ago
  I just sat on an enterprise onboarding call where their success engineer did in fact blame the AI and the client said "OK"
  - wasmainiac 8mo ago
    Not a good look lol.
  - jujube3 8mo ago
    More like a failure engineer, am I right?
- whynotmaybe 8mo ago
  I'm sure "bad quality" will soon be classified in the "cost of doing business" section like fines for not respecting laws. That's why AI is hurting us so much right now. We were always trying to have quality in our project, whether it was for readability or for code evolution. No, Steve, you don't name your 42 variables with only two letter and no you don't use Norse mythology for naming servers in your infrastructure. Yes Odin is the most powerful so it's the production server but Tyr for the source control and print server isn't really obvious. Well now AI is Steve. It will create nice little 300 lines functions with a block repeating 6 times. You know that you will have 6 fix to make instead of one if this block was in a simple function. It's not instinct a this point, is pure knowledge screaming "it's wrong". And you now realise that the hidden strength from your craft wasn't about coding the best binary tree search algorithm, it was about knowing the underlying soft unknowns that really made it software. We have a strong feeling that we're watching dozens of kids running with scissors and we don't know whether it's really scissors, we're just getting too old for this shit, or if we should just stop "progress" because we don't like it. We're the horse breeders when everyone discovered cars.
throwaway13337 8mo ago
He's wrong about SEO being the differentiator. Quality matters. It's a huge trope to think your product didn't work for the market because the marketers beat you. I used to be that kind of developer until I made some products that people actually wanted. But he's right that the software market is changing. Software will be easier to build and require less people to build it. So more, smaller companies will compete for market share. Margins will be cut and the consumers will get more of what they want for a lower price. I think this is called a working market. It's what it looks like when capitalism actually works. This could be the end of enshitification.
TrackerFF 8mo ago
I think the realistic take is to treat SaaS products like any other extremely skewed distribution, like income in sports. Most people will barely make anything, some will be able to supplement their income, very few will be able to make a living. Even less will become "rich". For every product that blows up, there are thousands that will barely make anything. But of course, it all depends on what your product does. If you make the millionth TODO / GenAI image editor / food calculator app and hope to make some money, good luck.
seyz 8mo ago
Side projects don't die from lack of time. They die from success anxiety. Shipping means facing judgment. An eternal WIP stays safe in the "potential" zone where it can't disappoint anyone including yourself
- leptons 8mo ago
  I'm going through this now. Once I start selling (hardware product), the cat is out of the bag, and further development becomes more difficult because there are paying customers. And we don't have the capacity to scale up if we "go viral". But AI has me pushing to do this somewhat prematurely because there's no guarantee I'll still be employed at the end of the year (due to "AI"), so the side project has to become a real thing right now.
- anonzzzies 8mo ago
  Yep, that feels likely. When tech people don't ship, they overarchitect. Add all the stuff 'the big guys' have to Be Ready for the big time when you launch. And then never launch after spending 1000s on infrastructure, tools etc. I have done it, I see many people do it around me.
iamleppert 8mo ago
You can only change the rules, you can never stop The Game™. Now, more than ever before, it's faster and easier to create something and deliver its perceived value at scale. Nerds used to rule the roost of tech because they were willing to invest the time and toil in obscurity. Now that's no longer the case. The only skill you need to have now is sales and showmanship. A chatbot can do the rest.
clarabennett26 8mo ago
[dead]
0xbadcafebee 8mo ago
We really need a downvote button on blog posts
wittjeff 8mo ago
> Listen: every idea you've ever had, every single one, some cocaine-addled sales critter has had too. And they're better than you at SEO. On most days I am resistant to stereotypes about "the welfare state" eroding incentives for entrepreneurism and innovation. But if you're going to wave it in my face like that, I might have to reconsider.
wseqyrku 8mo ago
> Listen: every idea you've ever had, every single one, some cocaine-addled sales critter has had too. You can test this, if you talk about your idea to three people and one of them says we're already doing that and the other two think you're insane, you'd be safe.
Bjorkbat 8mo ago
I always got the impression that the only way a relatively average software developer could make a “successful” SaaS is if they built something weird and niche that appeals to an audience of <1000 paying customers. In that sense, it doesn’t really matter if your competition is better at SEO since your competition never even thought to build something like this, never cared, and not to mention that the market for this thing is so small that SEO is arguably a wasted skill. You’ll need to acquire these people by finding them directly or through word of mouth. This blog post seems to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of solo-developer SaaS, but then again arguably mostly software developers also fundamentally misunderstand it.
gradus_ad 8mo ago
I mean just because it's easier to write software doesn't mean you can't have success building a business around software. You'll just need to build more features at a higher level of quality. When everyone has access to these tools the net effect will just be to elevate the overall quality of software which is good for everyone.
micimize 8mo ago
Vapid and wrong on every point. Many good ideas come from steeping in a novel soup of ideas for a long time, you don't need that many people to care about quality to make it a lucrative differentiator, and as I've seen many point out on X dot com the everything app: where's all the the shipped results of these slop torrent? The models are increasingly capable in impressive ways. Maybe the next gen will enable the "sales critter" to slop out commercially viable software with no tech know-how. If not, I'm sure we'll assume the next can, and if not that, the next. But feigning confidence about the shape and nature of this unfurling sea-change is absurd when the high-profile examples we have are like, what, moltbook? And denigrate _all_ potential ingenuity and insight unilaterally into the bargain? What a careless way of looking at the world

158 points by headalgorithm 8mo ago

0x303 8mo ago

I don't disagree with the sentiment, but it's a depressing take to say that the best approach for self-preservation is to latch hard onto corporate

Anonyneko 8mo ago
I feel like that isn't even anything new, most businesses have worked like that for a long time. It's much more straightforward to be a supplier for a few big clients than to be a B2C. We just don't hear about them as often because of their nature.

debo_ 8mo ago

On the flipside, there are a lot of businesses that don't open their digital product to multiple markets or verticals because the cost (in money or focus) is too high. Distribution just got a lot easier, arguably about as easy as it should have been in the first place. If you already have a reasonable moat for your product in a smallish market, going broad is a lot more feasible now. I'm doing it now (with partners who own the core product) and its going very well.

alangibson 8mo ago

I got out of software and into physical products a couple of years ago. I wish I could say I was prescient, but honestly it's just so much easier to sell physical items. Margins are worse, but selling is easier. If you've got a thing you can be sure that someone somewhere will give you money for it.

7777332215 8mo ago
What kind of physical products and what kind of customers?
- alangibson 8mo ago
  airtite.shop Stuff for old men like me
alex_suzuki 8mo ago
But… distribution is so much harder?
- alangibson 8mo ago
  There's legions of companies that will do warehousing and shipping for you. Definitely costs though. That's what I mean by margins being a significant difference.
  - alex_suzuki 8mo ago
    A friend of mine dabbles in niche hardware products. The amount of work he has to put in to get the CE and other certifications is significant. That’s before assembly, shipping (including customs shenanigans) and… returns. For a software guy like me, digital products seem much less daunting… and of course they scale “perfectly”. Nice smokers though, must be nice to earn money from something like that, congrats!
gordonhart 8mo ago
Kind of looks like vibecoding is doing to SaaS what Chinese mass manufacturing did to physical products two decades ago. Only the marketing and distribution matter in a world where it's very easy for others to clone something and sell it at a lower price.
- bwfan123 8mo ago
  > Only the marketing and distribution matter in a world where it's very easy for others to clone something and sell it at a lower price Great point. AI remixes and rips-off existing code-bases in a manner that is impossible to attribute copyright violation making it legal. ie, Perfect cloning. In a world where cloning is legal, the engineering cost of product drops to zero. That is where software production could be headed. What remains is marketing/distribution/sales. There will remain niches solving "hard problems" which cant be cloned, but those will be rare. Hard problems are where a lot of engineering complexity resides, involving interacting components for which there are no examples in training datasets to copy from. For example, a complex distributed system or hardware with multiple nuanced tradeoffs.
- rithdmc 8mo ago
  > Only the marketing and distribution matter Don't forget liability & compliance :)
- SoftTalker 8mo ago
  And yet people can still make money producing and selling high quality physical products. It's a smaller market but there are people who don't want mass produced chinese crap and they go out of their way to find it. There will be people who will pay for "human coded" software if it is better. Quality is always a differentiator that some people will pay for.
Debeli 8mo ago
Well, you're like then opposite version of me :D I was into physical products and services most of my life, and from recently I'm just trying to create stuff that can be sold digitally :D Still not there, but slowly getting to it.

bryanrasmussen 8mo ago

ok, but then to support him he suggests starring one of his github repos, isn't that just throwing out some breadcrumbs for the crows using his analogy?

Gud 8mo ago

“Quality is not a metric” is the core argument here. I say the only way to build a successful long term product is by focusing on quality, ESPECIALLY when the competition is shitting out crap.

CuriouslyC 8mo ago
Quality buys you user retention/longevity. You can't retain users you don't have though, and getting users now is brutal.
- Gud 8mo ago
  Getting users was always brutal
- pixl97 8mo ago
  Features get users, but features introduce complexity, bugs, technical debt, and maintenance expenses. More so this complexity requires that you have support for your users, and QA of weird functional interactions across systems boundaries that you just can't test for when actually writing the code. This gets expensive really fast. Complex software is hard, yo.
icedchai 8mo ago
I totally agree here. AI coding is raising the ceiling in terms of code quantity, but it also lowers the floor on quality, right into the sewer. Fortunately experienced developers are in the best position to use these tools properly, evaluate what works and what doesn't. We might drown in slop first though.

dave_sid 8mo ago

I think what is left is that understanding pain points and knowing what problems needs solved is more important now than ever. If anyone can create a product now then the one who knows what product to actually create is the winner. And who might this be? Well it might just be the people who spent the last 10 years speaking to customers, building a SaaS. They have 10 years of taking to customers finding out what to build. Even if they were to start from scratch today they already have the requirements in their pocket. The game has change. The ‘how’ we build it is easy. The ‘what’ we build is and always has been the hardest part of any SaaS or business.

habitable5 8mo ago
> The game has change. The ‘how’ we build it is easy. The ‘what’ we build is and always has been the hardest part of any SaaS or business. This is what the promptfondlers don't want to admit: the how has been easy for a long time. This last, I dunno, 35 years or so, Visual Basic, Delphi, whatnot, producing code has been very easy. You don't need a fundamentally fascist probabilistic nightmare to do it. The hard problems are indeed is "what" to build and how we maintain it. There's only hype. There's no results. https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware-why-ai-coding https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware... As for fascism, check https://blog.bgcarlisle.com/2025/05/16/a-plausible-scalable-and-slightly-wrong-black-box-why-large-language-models-are-a-fascist-technology-that-cannot-be-redeemed/ https://blog.bgcarlisle.com/2025/05/16/a-plausible-scalable-... for example > By “fascist” in this context, I mean that it is well suited to centralizing authority, eliminating checks on that authority and advancing an anti-science agenda. Or check Woodrow Hartzog & Jessica Silbey, How AI Destroys Institutions , 77 UC Law Journal (2026). Available at: https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/faculty_scholarship/4179 https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/faculty_scholarship/4179
- tonyedgecombe 8mo ago
  > This last, I dunno, 35 years or so, Visual Basic, Delphi, whatnot, producing code has been very easy I’m not so sure about that. It’s very easy to take your own knowledge for granted. Most people can’t do what we do. Most of my customers couldn’t even express what they wanted.

chasd00 8mo ago

I wish i could take back the view i gave to this article, it says nothing. Is there such a thing as an inverse hype machine? Where people take the opposite side of a hyped product and then hype that view just as much but for the same purpose? His footer even admits he's basically just trolling for views so he can reach the status of "thought leader". btw, someone else having the same idea you have for a saas company has always been the case forever. Individuals taking shortcuts in quality to get to market faster has also been the case forever. There's nothing new about either of those two things.

arkensaw 8mo ago
Exactly. If someone pitched you a book about a young kid who goes to a school of magic to learn how to use his powers, makes friends and enemies and ultimately battles evil, you might shoot down their dreams because "some cocaine-addled sales critter" already had that idea, and she's called J K Rowling and she's worth billions and shes so successful she can't even be cancelled because she makes so much money. And yet, Patrick Rothfuss's The Name Of The Wind is the same concept, and sold over a million copes, Lev Grossman's The Magicians is again the same concept, sold millions, and was adapted into a 5 season TV series for SyFy. If anything, the success of an idea only leads to a bigger appetite for that idea. Google was not the first search engine.
- pixl97 8mo ago
  > book about a young kid who goes to a school of magic to learn how to use his powers Add to this the 50 bajillion manga/anime's with the exact same trope.
- amarant 8mo ago
  Ot to the article, but I just feel I need to strongly recommend The Hierarchy by James Islington. It's pretty much the same idea as the above titles but omg it's so well written. Absolute must read!
  - arkensaw 8mo ago
    oh thanks, I'll check that out! BTW, The Magicians TV series might be the best thing SyFy ever made. It's got so much heart, it's properly funny, it's creative, it's epic despite a shoestring budget, and the characters stay with you long after you finish.

simpaticoder 8mo ago

>Yours actually works and is higher quality, because you know about things like TTFP and INP and "not putting your Supabase god-token in the client"? Oh, you sweet summer child: I take no pleasure in this but I need to tell you that these things don't matter anymore. Quality is not a metric anyone cares about in 2026. Quality will matter the most in 2026. Specifically because the barrier-to-entry for making software is down there will of course be a lot of poor quality software, which will break, expose customer data, be bloated, etc. Customers will have more options, and this will allow them to be more discerning. Open source, clean code, low dependencies...these are things that can be evaluated by HN crowd types, but it's also something that an LLM can evaluate. We are entering into an age of software taste. For those of us that have developed taste over the years, we become the taste makers in that we care how things are built, and know what we're looking for. This applies on the supply side, when our taste drives the LLM, and on the consumption side, when we can help the masses evaluate what to use and what not to use. NB: this is all speculation expressed as fact, in keeping with the OP's style.

lelanthran 8mo ago
> Customers will have more options, and this will allow them to be more discerning. Lets assume this is true - how on earth are they to determine that your code doesn't have any glaring security holes but the 2h vibe-coded app has more holes than the Swiss is able to put into their cheese[1]? I really want to know how customers can tell the difference between very pretty crap and your stuff? ------------- [1] Yeah, I know it doesn't work like that.
- pixl97 8mo ago
  Yep, choice can paralyze. What these customers are going to do is do a summary discard of almost all the choices but say 3 to 5 and go from there. The problem is now how to be consistently on that top list. And that's marketing's problem.
ileonichwiesz 8mo ago
Just like the tide of fast fashion caused people to seek out local-sewn clothes made from high-quality materials, right? Right? Quality isn’t a differentiator if the market is saturated with indistinguishable garbage. Everything is made in sweatshops out of the cheapest plastic available, and I don’t see why software isn’t next in line.

CuriouslyC 8mo ago

This vibes with me, though I think it's overly glum. You can't hope to succeed by building something cool without distribution already figured out. If you haven't put the work in building a social following, you're pretty much locked into pay to play (which isn't horrible if you target small targeted bloggers/youtubers/etc, but it's not my bag). OpenClaw exploded because Peter has >100k twitter followers and among them are plenty of people who themselves have a ton of followers. So, if you're building, you also need to focus on building an audience. The high touch enterprise sales strategy is solid though, and easier to bootstrap. That's why Alex Hormozi and Dan Martell push people getting started that way.

tjansen 8mo ago

Maybe it's wishful thinking, being one of the SaaS-developing developers he describes. But I think that only the complexity required for a SaaS is increasing. You certainly can't earn millions with the kind of SaaS that used to take a week or two, and can now be done on a weekend. So I am trying the kind of SaaS that I never dared to start, knowing that it would take a year or two of my spare time. And with AI agents, I now hope to complete it in 3 or 4 months, with a lot of extra features I would never have dared to include in an MVP.

arkensaw 8mo ago
do you want to tell us what it is?
- tjansen 8mo ago
  A cloud-based RSS reader (like Google Reader, Feedly, Inoreader...).
  - arkensaw 8mo ago
    sold :)
  - hagbard_c 8mo ago
    What would distinguish your cloud-based RSS reader from the many other cloud-based RSS readers, both self-hosted as well as the others?
    - tjansen 8mo ago
      Mainly, a friendly and simple UI. Feedly looks like it hasn't gotten much love recently. Inoreader is too cluttered for my taste, though it has a feature set I can't match any time soon. I have plenty of other ideas for what to build on top of it: offering an SDK and APIs so you can vibe-code the UI you want, a built-in podcast listener, using news from aggregated feeds to build a personalized AI feed. But the first step is to reach the Google Reader feature set minus social features.

apitman 8mo ago

I think a lot of opportunities are closing. But I also think a lot of new ones are being created. Pretty much impossible to predict. AI may end up being like "the bomber will always get through": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_bomber_will_always_get_through https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_bomber_will_always_get_thr...

clickety_clack 8mo ago

This is the kind of thing that anyone could have said at any time in history. Sure, it’s easier now to solve the kinds of problems that were hard a few years ago, but that just brings whole classes of previously “impossible” problems into the merely “hard” category. We’re just finding out what those are now, and if you can figure one out there’s money to be made.

dgxyz 8mo ago

Entering the SaaS market is dead because the market is saturated with mature products, not due to anything AI related. I've watched people try and enter the market we're in and fail because they can't build enough product to take any market share from anyone else. Build something else!

bambax 8mo ago

> What's that you're saying? Yours actually works and is higher quality, because you know about things like TTFP and INP and "not putting your Supabase god-token in the client"? Oh, you sweet summer child: I take no pleasure in this but I need to tell you that these things don't matter anymore. Quality is not a metric anyone cares about in 2026. That's funny and all but it can't really be true that quality doesn't matter. It has to matter at some point. Maybe it doesn't matter during the initial sales cycle; I've seen it happen: the CEO sees a slick demo that works, every user / developper rolls their eyes and try to warn them, they don't listen, and the deal is done. But eventually if the thing that's supposed to be done, isn't, something will have to give. Even if at first they fire all the eye-rollers and replace them with obedient corporate drones, if the think isn't working and it's on the critical path, it will have to be replaced by something that actually does work.

buffalobuffalo 8mo ago

So nobody will ever start another successful software project? People will, what, just stop creating software? I understand people's apprehension because of the pace of change, but this is just silly.

ForHackernews 8mo ago
You're overstating the case, but I think there's a strong possibility people will prompt AIs to produce bespoke apps that solve their niche use-case rather than paying a developer to do it. I pay for a SaaS app that tracks my finances, but it's not that great and missing some features I would like. Very soon I expect I'll be able to get a better, local-first replacement tailored to my needs by prompting Claude & Friends.
- buffalobuffalo 8mo ago
  There are two big advantages to using a 3rd party system. 1) There are a lot of cases where aggregated user data, even if anonymized, allows for insights that you can't get using just your own data. 2) The software is really just a stand in for a process. A way of doing something, like record keeping or tax filing, etc. A lot of times it makes sense to follow an already established process rather than creating your own. You are less likely to encounter unexpected pitfalls that way. I don't see how you can overcome those just by having an AI that can build simple crud apps at will.
- kvgr 8mo ago
  I think developers overestimate the amount of people who want to create app. My friends are lawyers, doctors, musicians, Pr, sales and they really dont care about creating their own apps or software. They use their iPhones for calls and Instagram.
  - SoftTalker 8mo ago
    That's kind of me. I have never purchased an app for my phone. I use what it came with: phone calls, imessage, maps, browser. That's all I need.

drchiu 8mo ago

It was never easy after ~2010.

larsiusprime 8mo ago

If I understand it, the premise of this article is that because the marginal cost of software production is now free, now nobody can compete against garbage quality code sold by the slickest "sales critter", so everyone should just give up. I mean, it seems at the very least, that open source and in-house production has a natural advantage here? If the marginal cost of software production is now free, then FOSS/in-house just got easier to create and maintain too. Does that make it easier for FOSS/in-house, both available without a subscription to an external third party, undermine "sales critter" SAAS, by the author's own premises?

pixl97 8mo ago
> now nobody can compete against garbage quality code sold by the slickest "sales critter", so everyone should just give up. Isn't that just SAP, er, I mean SAAS as it has been for a decade?

WarmWash 8mo ago

If dream of having a weekend-project turned $30k ARR SaaS is dead, good. It's an example of a tiny sliver of people losing their golden goose, so that everyone else in society can operate more efficiently. One guy loses $2400/mo in revenue 200 pool cleaners can now easily track their clients filter change dates without paying $12/mo for a calendar script (something that 20 years ago would have been a one time $3 purchase).

ramon156 8mo ago

Has OP been at a company where sales people do this? I have, and I can tell you they have not gotten far. There was one PM at my ex-job that showed a dashboard for... well... i honestly didnt understand. I think it was some uptime checks. It broke during his presentation. There's a company I hired at that "built an ERP in 5 days and is shipping the product in June". Same thing happened, it broke when presenting. Basic feature suggestions just returned a "Yes, we can do that!" (they meant they can tell Claude to do it, not that the product could do it). Maybe at some point non-engineers can prompt build, but for now I'd say we're pretty safe. I think engineers give themselves too little credit. Being able to read code is an amazing tool that can only be sharpened through skill. Lastly, I think I commented this ~2 years ago as well. If your product is vibe-codable and is replacing customers, it's a shit product. Similarly, if you can outsource your product on fiverr, its's a shit product.

ramon156 8mo ago
I wonder what the game dev side has been like with agentic coding. Starting a project from scratch is usually a boring task, so I wonder if - making a markdown file with all specs, details and plans - asking claude to search online and suggest some approaches is a better alternative to doing the research yourself.
- d0100 8mo ago
  I haven't had much success using LLM's in Unity as there is a lot of work that goes into the editor and cannot be done via code, especially if you are using several different assets

turnsout 8mo ago

If you've ever tried to build something real with agentic AI, you know that it takes time. You can't (yet) snap your fingers and produce a fully market-viable clone of a SaaS product. The specifics matter here. If you run a CRM for Dentists, can someone replicate your product in a weekend? I'm going to guess that dentists have some esoteric needs related to their CRM, and it's a little more complicated than an outsider might guess. So what is the threat model? That a dentist is going to get fed up and try to DIY? I think you should encourage that, so they'll see what goes into it. That a 22 year old chooses "CRM for Dentists" as a thing to vibe-code over a weekend? Again, good luck with that. I really dislike this SaaSocalypse fear mongering, because it's just not based in reality. Show me five examples of established SaaS companies being wiped out by vibe coding.

mmaunder 8mo ago

Someone needs a hug. Honestly I've started writing only to realize how much code output will be wasted over the next hour or two, so I just go back to coding the amazing product I'm working on with amazing agents, that would simply not be possible if I didn't have access to the AI tools I'm using. It's going to make many humans profoundly more safe. I'm very excited. I hope you are excited about your project too.

draw_down 8mo ago

[dead]

glhast 8mo ago

SaaS let's you simply pay to make blockers go away. Now that our time is more high leverage, why wouldn't you continue to do that? Let's say you could vibe your own replacement to a $20/month app in 16 hours. Congratulations, you did work valued at an $15/hour less token expenses (over 1 year).

sealthedeal 8mo ago

AI can self direct SEO pretty good, hate to be the bearer of bad news.

Tepix 8mo ago

> "If Mastodon's not your jam, maybe star one of my GitHub repos. It's really the least you can do." I like his sense of humour.

znnajdla 8mo ago

The author seems to be complaining about the fact that you can't make a pet hobby project succeed purely out of technical excellence. First of all welcome to the club: musicians and artists and people of taste have long lived with the constant pain of watching the majority of people consume crap. Secondly: it's not true that products cannot succeed on the basis of pure technical excellence. Figma, TigerBeetle, and much software of the highest class have won the market on the basis of technical excellence, and it's the kind of thing amateurs with AI will never be able to build. You need to find an audience with a real problem and then produce a technically superior solution that an amateur with AI cannot.

sph 8mo ago

Meanwhile, in the Silicon Valley: “OpenAI should build Slack” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47012553 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47012553 Yes, a very hyped mega-corp should be building and replacing all productivity software; why leave room for competitors when a single company can do it all? What can go wrong?

bsza 8mo ago

> And they're better than you at SEO Based on Louis Rossmann's rant 3 days ago [1], it seems Gemini has got you covered on that front too. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uKZ84zwJI0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uKZ84zwJI0

wasmainiac 8mo ago

> Quality is not a metric anyone cares about in 2026. When you write operational critical code, it matters. No one can blame “the AI made me do it” when things go down and hundreds of thousands of people are without service. When your code can hurt people, it matters. You can’t burn someone’s eye with a laser then point to some AI agent when lawsuits start flying in. When millions of dollars in production data is lost or corrupted, who is responsible? Not AI. Quality matters. I keep hearing this one phrase about code quality again and again. Sure, no one cares about the dumb little linter failing your builds, but when code quality comes to responsibility, it goes hand in hand. It’s either that or your all working on hobby projects.

calvinmorrison 8mo ago
I just sat on an enterprise onboarding call where their success engineer did in fact blame the AI and the client said "OK"
- wasmainiac 8mo ago
  Not a good look lol.
- jujube3 8mo ago
  More like a failure engineer, am I right?
whynotmaybe 8mo ago
I'm sure "bad quality" will soon be classified in the "cost of doing business" section like fines for not respecting laws. That's why AI is hurting us so much right now. We were always trying to have quality in our project, whether it was for readability or for code evolution. No, Steve, you don't name your 42 variables with only two letter and no you don't use Norse mythology for naming servers in your infrastructure. Yes Odin is the most powerful so it's the production server but Tyr for the source control and print server isn't really obvious. Well now AI is Steve. It will create nice little 300 lines functions with a block repeating 6 times. You know that you will have 6 fix to make instead of one if this block was in a simple function. It's not instinct a this point, is pure knowledge screaming "it's wrong". And you now realise that the hidden strength from your craft wasn't about coding the best binary tree search algorithm, it was about knowing the underlying soft unknowns that really made it software. We have a strong feeling that we're watching dozens of kids running with scissors and we don't know whether it's really scissors, we're just getting too old for this shit, or if we should just stop "progress" because we don't like it. We're the horse breeders when everyone discovered cars.

throwaway13337 8mo ago

He's wrong about SEO being the differentiator. Quality matters. It's a huge trope to think your product didn't work for the market because the marketers beat you. I used to be that kind of developer until I made some products that people actually wanted. But he's right that the software market is changing. Software will be easier to build and require less people to build it. So more, smaller companies will compete for market share. Margins will be cut and the consumers will get more of what they want for a lower price. I think this is called a working market. It's what it looks like when capitalism actually works. This could be the end of enshitification.

TrackerFF 8mo ago

I think the realistic take is to treat SaaS products like any other extremely skewed distribution, like income in sports. Most people will barely make anything, some will be able to supplement their income, very few will be able to make a living. Even less will become "rich". For every product that blows up, there are thousands that will barely make anything. But of course, it all depends on what your product does. If you make the millionth TODO / GenAI image editor / food calculator app and hope to make some money, good luck.

seyz 8mo ago

Side projects don't die from lack of time. They die from success anxiety. Shipping means facing judgment. An eternal WIP stays safe in the "potential" zone where it can't disappoint anyone including yourself

leptons 8mo ago
I'm going through this now. Once I start selling (hardware product), the cat is out of the bag, and further development becomes more difficult because there are paying customers. And we don't have the capacity to scale up if we "go viral". But AI has me pushing to do this somewhat prematurely because there's no guarantee I'll still be employed at the end of the year (due to "AI"), so the side project has to become a real thing right now.
anonzzzies 8mo ago
Yep, that feels likely. When tech people don't ship, they overarchitect. Add all the stuff 'the big guys' have to Be Ready for the big time when you launch. And then never launch after spending 1000s on infrastructure, tools etc. I have done it, I see many people do it around me.

iamleppert 8mo ago

You can only change the rules, you can never stop The Game™. Now, more than ever before, it's faster and easier to create something and deliver its perceived value at scale. Nerds used to rule the roost of tech because they were willing to invest the time and toil in obscurity. Now that's no longer the case. The only skill you need to have now is sales and showmanship. A chatbot can do the rest.

clarabennett26 8mo ago

[dead]

0xbadcafebee 8mo ago

We really need a downvote button on blog posts

wittjeff 8mo ago

> Listen: every idea you've ever had, every single one, some cocaine-addled sales critter has had too. And they're better than you at SEO. On most days I am resistant to stereotypes about "the welfare state" eroding incentives for entrepreneurism and innovation. But if you're going to wave it in my face like that, I might have to reconsider.

wseqyrku 8mo ago

> Listen: every idea you've ever had, every single one, some cocaine-addled sales critter has had too. You can test this, if you talk about your idea to three people and one of them says we're already doing that and the other two think you're insane, you'd be safe.

Bjorkbat 8mo ago

I always got the impression that the only way a relatively average software developer could make a “successful” SaaS is if they built something weird and niche that appeals to an audience of <1000 paying customers. In that sense, it doesn’t really matter if your competition is better at SEO since your competition never even thought to build something like this, never cared, and not to mention that the market for this thing is so small that SEO is arguably a wasted skill. You’ll need to acquire these people by finding them directly or through word of mouth. This blog post seems to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of solo-developer SaaS, but then again arguably mostly software developers also fundamentally misunderstand it.

gradus_ad 8mo ago

I mean just because it's easier to write software doesn't mean you can't have success building a business around software. You'll just need to build more features at a higher level of quality. When everyone has access to these tools the net effect will just be to elevate the overall quality of software which is good for everyone.

micimize 8mo ago

Vapid and wrong on every point. Many good ideas come from steeping in a novel soup of ideas for a long time, you don't need that many people to care about quality to make it a lucrative differentiator, and as I've seen many point out on X dot com the everything app: where's all the the shipped results of these slop torrent? The models are increasingly capable in impressive ways. Maybe the next gen will enable the "sales critter" to slop out commercially viable software with no tech know-how. If not, I'm sure we'll assume the next can, and if not that, the next. But feigning confidence about the shape and nature of this unfurling sea-change is absurd when the high-profile examples we have are like, what, moltbook? And denigrate _all_ potential ingenuity and insight unilaterally into the bargain? What a careless way of looking at the world