6 ms·

> Its also worth noting that if you can create a business with an LLM, so can everyone else. And sadly everyone has the same ideas Yeah, this is quite thought

by josephg 8mo ago

> Its also worth noting that if you can create a business with an LLM, so can everyone else. And sadly everyone has the same ideas Yeah, this is quite thought provoking. If computer code written by LLMs is a commodity, what new businesses does that enable? What can we do cheaply we couldn't do before? One obvious answer is we can make a lot more custom stuff. Like, why buy Windows and Office when I can just ask claude to write me my own versions instead? Why run a commodity operating system on kiosks? We can make so many more one-off pieces of software. The fact software has been so expensive to write over the last few decades has forced software developers to think a lot about how to collaborate. We reuse code as much as we can - in shared libraries, common operating systems & APIs, cloud services (eg AWS) and so on. And these solutions all come with downsides - like supply chain attacks, subscription fees and service outages. LLMs can let every project invent its own tree of dependencies. Which is equal parts great and terrifying. There's that old line that businesses should "commoditise their compliment". If you're amazon, you want package delivery services to be cheap and competitive. If software is the commodity, what is the bespoke value-added service that can sit on top of all that?

pixelatedindex 8mo ago
> If software is the commodity, what is the bespoke value-added service that can sit on top of all that? It would be cool if I can brew hardware at home by getting AI to design and 3D print circuit boards with bespoke software. Alas, we are constrained by physics. At the moment.
echelon 8mo ago
> Yeah, this is quite thought provoking. If computer code written by LLMs is a commodity, what new businesses does that enable? What can we do cheaply we couldn't do before? The model owner can just withhold access and build all the businesses themselves. Financial capital used to need labor capital. It doesn't anymore. We're entering into scary territory. I would feel much better if this were all open source, but of course it isn't.
- cardine 8mo ago
  I think this risk is much lower in a world where there are lots of different model owners competing with each other, which is how it appears to be playing out.
  - toyg 8mo ago
    New fields are always competitive. Eventually, if left to its own devices, a capitalist market will inevitably consolidate into cartels and monopolies. Governments better pay attention and possibly act before it's too late.
    - josephg 8mo ago
      > Governments better pay attention and possibly act before it's too late. Before its too late for what? For OpenAI and Claude to privatise their models and restrict (or massively jack up the prices) for their APIs? The genie is already out of the bottle. The transformers paper was public. The US has OpenAI, Anthropic, Grok, Google and Meta all making foundation models. China has Deepseek. And Huggingface is awash with smaller models you can run at home. Training and running your own models is really easy. Monopolistic rent seeking over this technology is - for now - more or less impossible. It would simply be too difficult & expensive for one player to gobble up all their competitors, across multiple continents. And if they tried, I'm sure investors will happily back a new company to fight back.
- codebje 8mo ago
  Why would the model owner do that? You still need some human input to operate the business, so it would be terribly impractical to try to run all the businesses. Better to sell the model to everyone else, since everyone will need it. The only existential threat to the model owner is everyone being a model owner, and I suspect that's the main reason why all the world's memory supply is sitting in a warehouse, unused.
vardalab 8mo ago
We said the same thing when 3D printing came out. Any sort of cool tech, we think everybody’s going to do it. Most people are not capable of doing it. in college everybody was going to be an engineer and then they drop out after the first intro to physics or calculus class. A bunch of my non tech friends were vibe coding some tools with replit and lovable and I looked at their stuff and yeah it was neat but it wasn't gonna go anywhere and if it did go somewhere, they would need to find somebody who actually knows what they're doing. To actually execute on these things takes a different kind of thinking. Unless we get to the stage where it's just like magic genie, lol. Maybe then everybody’s going to vibe their own software.
- gjk3 8mo ago
  Thank you for posting this. Im really tired, and exhausted of reading simple takes. Grok is a very capable LLM that can produce decent videos. Why are most garbage? Because NOT EVERYONE HAS THE SKILL NOR THE WILL TO DO IT WELL!
  - ghurtado 8mo ago
    The answer is taste. I don't know if they will ever get there, but LLMs are a long ways away from having decent creative taste. Which means they are just another tool in the artist's toolbox, not a tool that will replace the artist. Same as every other tool before it: amazing in capable hands, boring in the hands of the average person.
    - gjk3 8mo ago
      100% correct. Taste is the correct term - I avoid using it as Im not sure many people here actually get what it truly means. How can I proclaim what I said in the comment above? Because Ive spent the past week producing something very high quality with Grok. Has it been easy? Hell no. Could anyone just pick up and do what Ive done? Hell no. It requires things like patience, artistry, taste etc etc. The current tech is soul-less in most people hands and it should remain used in a narrow range in this context. The last thing I want to see is low quality slop infesting the web. But hey that is not what the model producers want - they want to maximize tokens.
tyingq 8mo ago
> If software is the commodity, what is the bespoke value-added service that can sit on top of all that? Troubleshooting and fixing the big mess that nobody fully understands when it eventually falls over?
- petcat 8mo ago
  > Troubleshooting and fixing the big mess that nobody fully understands If that's actually the future of humans in software engineering then that sounds like a nightmare career that I want no part of. Just the same as I don't want anything to do with the gigantic mess of Cobal and Java powering legacy systems today. And I also push back on the idea that llms can't troubleshoot and fix things, and therefore will eventually require humans again. My experience has been the opposite. I've found that llms are even better at troubleshooting and fixing an existing code base than they are at writing greenfield code from scratch.
  - tyingq 8mo ago
    My experience so far has been they are somewhat good at troubleshooting code, patterns, etc, that exist in the publicly viewable sphere of stuff it's trained on, where common error messages and pitfalls are "google-able" They are much worse at code/patterns/apis that were locally created, including things created by the same LLM that's trying to fix a problem. I think LLMs are also creating a decline in the amount of good troubleshooting information being published on the internet. So less future content to scrape.
xyzzy123 8mo ago
Even if code gets cheaper, running your own versions of things comes with significant downsides. Software exists as part of an ecosystem of related software, human communities, companies etc. Software benefits from network effects both at development time and at runtime. With full custom software, you users / customers won't be experienced with it. AI won't automatically know all about it, or be able to diagnose errors without detailed inspection. You can't name drop it. You don't benefit from shared effort by the community / vendors. Support is more difficult. We are also likely to see "the bar" for what constitutes good software raise over time. All the big software companies are in a position to direct enormous token flows into their flagship products, and they have every incentive to get really good at scaling that.
charlieflowers 8mo ago
This reminds me of the old idea of the Lisp curse. The claim was that Lisp, with the power of homoiconic macros, would magnify the effectiveness of one strong engineer so much that they could build everything custom, ignoring prior art. They would get amazing amounts done, but no one else could understand the internals because they were so uniquely shaped by the inner nuances of one mind.
somenameforme 8mo ago
The logical endgame (which I do not think we will necessarily reach) would be the end of software development as a career in itself. Instead software development would just become a tool anybody could use in their own specific domain. For instance if a manager needs some employee scheduling software, they would simply describe their exact needs and have software customized exactly to their needs, with a UI that fits their preference, ready to go in no time, instead of finding some SaaS that probably doesn't fit exactly what they want, learning how to use it, jumping through a million hoops, dealing with updates you don't like, and then paying a perpetual rent on top of all of this.
- schrodinger 8mo ago
  Writing the code has never been the hard part for the vast majority of businesses. It's become an order of magnitude cheaper, and that WILL have effects. Businesses that are selling crud apps will falter. But your hypothetical manager who needs employee scheduling software isn't paying for the coding, they're paying for someone to _figure out_ their exact needs, and with a UI that fits their preference, ready to go in no time. I've thought a lot about this and I don't think it'll be the death of SaaS. I don't think it's the death of a software engineer either — but a major transformation of the role and the death if your career _if you do not adapt_, and fast. Agentic coding makes software cheap, and will commoditize a large swath of SaaS that exists primarily because software used to be expensive to build and maintain. Low-value SaaS dies. High-value SaaS survives based on domain expertise, integrations, and distribution. Regulations adapt. Internal tools proliferate.
  - tuatoru 8mo ago
    > they're paying for someone to _figure out_ their exact needs, Back in the 1980s this was called "systems analysis". The role disappeared a bit before the web came along, and coders were tasked with the job or told to just guess what the exact needs are, which is why so much software is trash. I don't know, though, Claude Opus is most of the way to being a good systems analyst, and early reports say that having an AI provide descriptions/requirements to a fleet of code-writing AIs gives better results than having a human do it.
oblio 8mo ago
> If software is the commodity, what is the bespoke value-added service that can sit on top of all that? Aggregation. Platforms that provide visibility, influence, reach.
azath92 8mo ago
This whole comment thread here is really echoing and adding to some thoughts ive had lately on the shift from considering LLMs replacing engineering to make software (much of which is about integration, longevity and customization of a general system), vs LLMs replacing buying software. If most software is just used by me to do a specific task, then being able to make software for me to do that task will become the norm. Following that thought, we are going to see a drastic reduction in SASS solutions, as many people who were buying a flexible-toolbox for one usecase to use occasionally, just get an llm to make them the script/software to do that task as and when they need it, without any concern for things like security, longevity, ease of use by others (for better or for worse). I guess what im circling around is that if we define engineering as building the complex tools that have to interact with many other systems, persist, be generally useful and understandable to many people, and we consider that many people actually dont need that complexity for their use of the system, the complexity arises from it needing to serve its purpose at huge scale over time. then maybe there will be less need for enginners, but perhaps first and foremost because the problems that engineering is required to solve are much less if much more focused and bespoke solutions to peoples problems are available on demand. As an engineer i have often felt threatened by LLMs and agents of late, but i find that if i reframe it from Agents replacing me, to Agents causing the type of problems that are even valuable to solve to shift, it feels less threatening for some reason. Ill have to mull more.
- Andrex 8mo ago
  Taking it further, imagine a traditional desktop OS but it generates your programs on the fly. Google's weird AI browser project is kind of a step in this direction. Instead of starting with a list of programs and services and customizing your work to that workflow, you start with the task you need accomplished and the operating system creates an optimized UI flow specifically for that task.
  - luqtas 8mo ago
    but bringing it back, you 1° need to pitch this idea to investors liberate money to cover the Sahara desert with a huge server to suffice these sci-fi needs /s
TheDong 8mo ago
> why buy Windows and Office when I can just ask claude to write me my own versions instead? Why run a commodity operating system on kiosks? Linux costs $0. Creating a linux clone compatible with your hardware from the hardware spec sheets with an AI for complicated hardware would cost thousands to millions of dollars in tokens, and you'd end up with something that works worse than linux (or more likely something that doesn't even boot). Even if the price falls by a thousand fold, why would you spend thousands of dollars on tokens to develop an OS when there's already one you can use? Even if software becomes cheaper to write, it's not free, and there's a lot of software (especially libraries) out there which is free.
- josephg 8mo ago
  > cost thousands to millions of dollars in tokens > Even if the price falls by a thousand fold, why would you spend thousands of dollars on tokens to develop an OS when there's already one you can use? Why do you assume token price will only fall a thousand fold? I'm pretty sure tokens have fallen by more than that in the last few years already - at least if we're speaking about like-for-like intelligence. I suspect AI token costs will fall exponentially over the next decade or two. Like Dennard scaling / Moore's law has for CPUs over the last 40 years. Especially given the amount of investment being poured into LLMs at the moment. Essentially the entire computing hardware industry is retooling to manufacture AI clusters. If it costs you $1-$10 in tokens to get the AI to make a bespoke operating system for your embedded hardware, people will absolutely do it. Especially if it frees them up from supply chain attacks. Linux is free, but linux isn't well optimized for embedded systems. I think my electric piano runs linux internally. It takes 10 seconds to boot. Boo to that.
  - dakolli 8mo ago
    Token prices have literally gone up, where are you getting this information from.... Noone would have pay for a bespoke linux made by an stochastic llm when security is a concern, even if it was $10.00 which it will never be. The hardware required to run these things has all ballooned in price, there are no efficiencies coming. To run Kimi2.5 4bit you're sitll spending 100k in hardware, and its not nearly as reliable as Claude. Also Agentic Tooling have made their token consumption go up to increase revenue, and models are becoming more verbose in their output (wonder why). You're smoking something.
breppp 8mo ago
> One obvious answer is we can make a lot more custom stuff. Like, why buy Windows and Office when I can just ask claude to write me my own versions instead? Why run a commodity operating system on kiosks? We can make so many more one-off pieces of software yes, it will enable a lot of custom one-off software but I think people are forgetting the advantages of multiple copied instances, which is what enabled software to be so successful in the first place. Mass production of the same piece of software creates standards, every word processor uses the same format and displays it the same way. Every date library you import will calculate two months from now the same way, therefore this is code you don't have to constantly double check in your debug sessions.
miki123211 8mo ago
Software isn't just the code, it's also the stability that can only be gained after years of successful operation and ironing out bugs, the understanding of who your customers truly are, what are their actual needs (and not perceived needs), which features will drive growth. etc. I think there's still a "there" there. I think the kind of software that everybody needs (think Slack or Jira) is at the greatest risk, as everybody will want to compete in those fields, which will drive margins to 0 (and that's a good thing for customers)! However, I think small businesses pandering to specific user groups will still be viable.

by josephg 8mo ago

pixelatedindex 8mo ago

> If software is the commodity, what is the bespoke value-added service that can sit on top of all that? It would be cool if I can brew hardware at home by getting AI to design and 3D print circuit boards with bespoke software. Alas, we are constrained by physics. At the moment.

echelon 8mo ago

> Yeah, this is quite thought provoking. If computer code written by LLMs is a commodity, what new businesses does that enable? What can we do cheaply we couldn't do before? The model owner can just withhold access and build all the businesses themselves. Financial capital used to need labor capital. It doesn't anymore. We're entering into scary territory. I would feel much better if this were all open source, but of course it isn't.

cardine 8mo ago
I think this risk is much lower in a world where there are lots of different model owners competing with each other, which is how it appears to be playing out.
- toyg 8mo ago
  New fields are always competitive. Eventually, if left to its own devices, a capitalist market will inevitably consolidate into cartels and monopolies. Governments better pay attention and possibly act before it's too late.
  - josephg 8mo ago
    > Governments better pay attention and possibly act before it's too late. Before its too late for what? For OpenAI and Claude to privatise their models and restrict (or massively jack up the prices) for their APIs? The genie is already out of the bottle. The transformers paper was public. The US has OpenAI, Anthropic, Grok, Google and Meta all making foundation models. China has Deepseek. And Huggingface is awash with smaller models you can run at home. Training and running your own models is really easy. Monopolistic rent seeking over this technology is - for now - more or less impossible. It would simply be too difficult & expensive for one player to gobble up all their competitors, across multiple continents. And if they tried, I'm sure investors will happily back a new company to fight back.
codebje 8mo ago
Why would the model owner do that? You still need some human input to operate the business, so it would be terribly impractical to try to run all the businesses. Better to sell the model to everyone else, since everyone will need it. The only existential threat to the model owner is everyone being a model owner, and I suspect that's the main reason why all the world's memory supply is sitting in a warehouse, unused.

vardalab 8mo ago

We said the same thing when 3D printing came out. Any sort of cool tech, we think everybody’s going to do it. Most people are not capable of doing it. in college everybody was going to be an engineer and then they drop out after the first intro to physics or calculus class. A bunch of my non tech friends were vibe coding some tools with replit and lovable and I looked at their stuff and yeah it was neat but it wasn't gonna go anywhere and if it did go somewhere, they would need to find somebody who actually knows what they're doing. To actually execute on these things takes a different kind of thinking. Unless we get to the stage where it's just like magic genie, lol. Maybe then everybody’s going to vibe their own software.

gjk3 8mo ago
Thank you for posting this. Im really tired, and exhausted of reading simple takes. Grok is a very capable LLM that can produce decent videos. Why are most garbage? Because NOT EVERYONE HAS THE SKILL NOR THE WILL TO DO IT WELL!
- ghurtado 8mo ago
  The answer is taste. I don't know if they will ever get there, but LLMs are a long ways away from having decent creative taste. Which means they are just another tool in the artist's toolbox, not a tool that will replace the artist. Same as every other tool before it: amazing in capable hands, boring in the hands of the average person.
  - gjk3 8mo ago
    100% correct. Taste is the correct term - I avoid using it as Im not sure many people here actually get what it truly means. How can I proclaim what I said in the comment above? Because Ive spent the past week producing something very high quality with Grok. Has it been easy? Hell no. Could anyone just pick up and do what Ive done? Hell no. It requires things like patience, artistry, taste etc etc. The current tech is soul-less in most people hands and it should remain used in a narrow range in this context. The last thing I want to see is low quality slop infesting the web. But hey that is not what the model producers want - they want to maximize tokens.

tyingq 8mo ago

> If software is the commodity, what is the bespoke value-added service that can sit on top of all that? Troubleshooting and fixing the big mess that nobody fully understands when it eventually falls over?

petcat 8mo ago
> Troubleshooting and fixing the big mess that nobody fully understands If that's actually the future of humans in software engineering then that sounds like a nightmare career that I want no part of. Just the same as I don't want anything to do with the gigantic mess of Cobal and Java powering legacy systems today. And I also push back on the idea that llms can't troubleshoot and fix things, and therefore will eventually require humans again. My experience has been the opposite. I've found that llms are even better at troubleshooting and fixing an existing code base than they are at writing greenfield code from scratch.
- tyingq 8mo ago
  My experience so far has been they are somewhat good at troubleshooting code, patterns, etc, that exist in the publicly viewable sphere of stuff it's trained on, where common error messages and pitfalls are "google-able" They are much worse at code/patterns/apis that were locally created, including things created by the same LLM that's trying to fix a problem. I think LLMs are also creating a decline in the amount of good troubleshooting information being published on the internet. So less future content to scrape.

xyzzy123 8mo ago

Even if code gets cheaper, running your own versions of things comes with significant downsides. Software exists as part of an ecosystem of related software, human communities, companies etc. Software benefits from network effects both at development time and at runtime. With full custom software, you users / customers won't be experienced with it. AI won't automatically know all about it, or be able to diagnose errors without detailed inspection. You can't name drop it. You don't benefit from shared effort by the community / vendors. Support is more difficult. We are also likely to see "the bar" for what constitutes good software raise over time. All the big software companies are in a position to direct enormous token flows into their flagship products, and they have every incentive to get really good at scaling that.

charlieflowers 8mo ago

This reminds me of the old idea of the Lisp curse. The claim was that Lisp, with the power of homoiconic macros, would magnify the effectiveness of one strong engineer so much that they could build everything custom, ignoring prior art. They would get amazing amounts done, but no one else could understand the internals because they were so uniquely shaped by the inner nuances of one mind.

somenameforme 8mo ago

The logical endgame (which I do not think we will necessarily reach) would be the end of software development as a career in itself. Instead software development would just become a tool anybody could use in their own specific domain. For instance if a manager needs some employee scheduling software, they would simply describe their exact needs and have software customized exactly to their needs, with a UI that fits their preference, ready to go in no time, instead of finding some SaaS that probably doesn't fit exactly what they want, learning how to use it, jumping through a million hoops, dealing with updates you don't like, and then paying a perpetual rent on top of all of this.

schrodinger 8mo ago
Writing the code has never been the hard part for the vast majority of businesses. It's become an order of magnitude cheaper, and that WILL have effects. Businesses that are selling crud apps will falter. But your hypothetical manager who needs employee scheduling software isn't paying for the coding, they're paying for someone to _figure out_ their exact needs, and with a UI that fits their preference, ready to go in no time. I've thought a lot about this and I don't think it'll be the death of SaaS. I don't think it's the death of a software engineer either — but a major transformation of the role and the death if your career _if you do not adapt_, and fast. Agentic coding makes software cheap, and will commoditize a large swath of SaaS that exists primarily because software used to be expensive to build and maintain. Low-value SaaS dies. High-value SaaS survives based on domain expertise, integrations, and distribution. Regulations adapt. Internal tools proliferate.
- tuatoru 8mo ago
  > they're paying for someone to _figure out_ their exact needs, Back in the 1980s this was called "systems analysis". The role disappeared a bit before the web came along, and coders were tasked with the job or told to just guess what the exact needs are, which is why so much software is trash. I don't know, though, Claude Opus is most of the way to being a good systems analyst, and early reports say that having an AI provide descriptions/requirements to a fleet of code-writing AIs gives better results than having a human do it.

oblio 8mo ago

> If software is the commodity, what is the bespoke value-added service that can sit on top of all that? Aggregation. Platforms that provide visibility, influence, reach.

azath92 8mo ago

This whole comment thread here is really echoing and adding to some thoughts ive had lately on the shift from considering LLMs replacing engineering to make software (much of which is about integration, longevity and customization of a general system), vs LLMs replacing buying software. If most software is just used by me to do a specific task, then being able to make software for me to do that task will become the norm. Following that thought, we are going to see a drastic reduction in SASS solutions, as many people who were buying a flexible-toolbox for one usecase to use occasionally, just get an llm to make them the script/software to do that task as and when they need it, without any concern for things like security, longevity, ease of use by others (for better or for worse). I guess what im circling around is that if we define engineering as building the complex tools that have to interact with many other systems, persist, be generally useful and understandable to many people, and we consider that many people actually dont need that complexity for their use of the system, the complexity arises from it needing to serve its purpose at huge scale over time. then maybe there will be less need for enginners, but perhaps first and foremost because the problems that engineering is required to solve are much less if much more focused and bespoke solutions to peoples problems are available on demand. As an engineer i have often felt threatened by LLMs and agents of late, but i find that if i reframe it from Agents replacing me, to Agents causing the type of problems that are even valuable to solve to shift, it feels less threatening for some reason. Ill have to mull more.

Andrex 8mo ago
Taking it further, imagine a traditional desktop OS but it generates your programs on the fly. Google's weird AI browser project is kind of a step in this direction. Instead of starting with a list of programs and services and customizing your work to that workflow, you start with the task you need accomplished and the operating system creates an optimized UI flow specifically for that task.
- luqtas 8mo ago
  but bringing it back, you 1° need to pitch this idea to investors liberate money to cover the Sahara desert with a huge server to suffice these sci-fi needs /s

TheDong 8mo ago

> why buy Windows and Office when I can just ask claude to write me my own versions instead? Why run a commodity operating system on kiosks? Linux costs $0. Creating a linux clone compatible with your hardware from the hardware spec sheets with an AI for complicated hardware would cost thousands to millions of dollars in tokens, and you'd end up with something that works worse than linux (or more likely something that doesn't even boot). Even if the price falls by a thousand fold, why would you spend thousands of dollars on tokens to develop an OS when there's already one you can use? Even if software becomes cheaper to write, it's not free, and there's a lot of software (especially libraries) out there which is free.

josephg 8mo ago
> cost thousands to millions of dollars in tokens > Even if the price falls by a thousand fold, why would you spend thousands of dollars on tokens to develop an OS when there's already one you can use? Why do you assume token price will only fall a thousand fold? I'm pretty sure tokens have fallen by more than that in the last few years already - at least if we're speaking about like-for-like intelligence. I suspect AI token costs will fall exponentially over the next decade or two. Like Dennard scaling / Moore's law has for CPUs over the last 40 years. Especially given the amount of investment being poured into LLMs at the moment. Essentially the entire computing hardware industry is retooling to manufacture AI clusters. If it costs you $1-$10 in tokens to get the AI to make a bespoke operating system for your embedded hardware, people will absolutely do it. Especially if it frees them up from supply chain attacks. Linux is free, but linux isn't well optimized for embedded systems. I think my electric piano runs linux internally. It takes 10 seconds to boot. Boo to that.
- dakolli 8mo ago
  Token prices have literally gone up, where are you getting this information from.... Noone would have pay for a bespoke linux made by an stochastic llm when security is a concern, even if it was $10.00 which it will never be. The hardware required to run these things has all ballooned in price, there are no efficiencies coming. To run Kimi2.5 4bit you're sitll spending 100k in hardware, and its not nearly as reliable as Claude. Also Agentic Tooling have made their token consumption go up to increase revenue, and models are becoming more verbose in their output (wonder why). You're smoking something.

breppp 8mo ago

> One obvious answer is we can make a lot more custom stuff. Like, why buy Windows and Office when I can just ask claude to write me my own versions instead? Why run a commodity operating system on kiosks? We can make so many more one-off pieces of software yes, it will enable a lot of custom one-off software but I think people are forgetting the advantages of multiple copied instances, which is what enabled software to be so successful in the first place. Mass production of the same piece of software creates standards, every word processor uses the same format and displays it the same way. Every date library you import will calculate two months from now the same way, therefore this is code you don't have to constantly double check in your debug sessions.

miki123211 8mo ago

Software isn't just the code, it's also the stability that can only be gained after years of successful operation and ironing out bugs, the understanding of who your customers truly are, what are their actual needs (and not perceived needs), which features will drive growth. etc. I think there's still a "there" there. I think the kind of software that everybody needs (think Slack or Jira) is at the greatest risk, as everybody will want to compete in those fields, which will drive margins to 0 (and that's a good thing for customers)! However, I think small businesses pandering to specific user groups will still be viable.