11 ms·

A16z partner says that the theory that we’ll vibe code everything is wrong

190 points by paulpauper 9mo ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aq0JSbuIppQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aq0JSbuIppQ

sanction8 9mo ago
a16z talking again? This is your regular reminder that 1) a16z is one the largest backers of LLMs 2) They named one of the two authors of the Fascist Manifesto their patron saint 3) AI systems are built to function in ways that degrade and are likely to destroy our crucial civic institutions. (Quoted from Professor Woodrow Hartzog "How AI Destroys Institutions"). Or to put it another way, being plausible but slightly wrong and un-auditable—at scale—is the killer feature of LLMs and this combination of properties makes it an essentially fascist technology meaning it is well suited to centralizing authority, eliminating checks on that authority and advancing an anti-science agenda (quoted from the A plausible, scalable and slightly wrong black box: why large language models are a fascist technology that cannot be redeemed post).
- arjie 9mo ago
  I will not claim to be an expert historian but one general belief I have is that nomenclature undergoes semantic migration over a century. So for the sake of conciseness I will quote the first demand of each portion of the Fascist Manifesto. This isn't to obscure, because it is in Wikipedia[0] and translated in English on EN Wikipedia[1], but so I can share a sample of whether this is something we can relate to our present day political orientation. Hopefully it will inform what you believe "author of the Fascist Manifesto" to imply: > ... > For this WE WANT: > On the political problem: > Universal suffrage by regional list voting, with proportional representation, voting and eligibility for women. > ... > On the social problem: > WE WANT: > The prompt enactment of a state law enshrining the legal eight-hour workday for all jobs. > ... > On the military issue: > WE WANT: > The establishment of a national militia with brief educational services and exclusively defensive duty. > ... > On the financial problem: > WE WANT: > A strong extraordinary tax on capital of a progressive nature, having the form of true PARTIAL EXPROPRIATION of all wealth. > ... 0: https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programma_di_San_Sepolcro#Testo https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programma_di_San_Sepolcro#Test... 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascist_Manifesto#Text https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascist_Manifesto#Text
  - holden_nelson 9mo ago
    I’m not particularly political and am also not a historian but I don’t think it’s necessarily correct to equate the literal text of the manifesto with the principles and practices of fascism. The message of universal suffrage vs. that of preventing an out group from “stealing” an election are not far apart semantically. Same with workers rights - in practice the worker protection laws that were passed in Italy at this time were so full of loopholes and qualifications that ultimately the workers do not gain power in that system. It is this fair, in my view, to question the spirit of the manifesto in the first place.
    - arjie 9mo ago
      I suppose we should, in being intellectually consistent, take the appropriate position that 8 hours / day and a wealth tax are fascist principles.
  - decidu0us9034 9mo ago
    Sure. They're making a strong claim, but I think they mean "author of the Fascist Manifesto" as shorthand to say Marinetti was an ardent supporter of fascism and Mussolini. His support continued throughout the 30's and 40's, even after the Pact of Steel and the Racial Laws etc, even volunteering to go to the Eastern Front. I think we can say with the benefit of hindsight that the fascists' attempts to ingratiate themselves to the worker's movement were sort of ancilliary to the whole political/ideological project... I mean I'd hope any student of history agrees with that...
- nylonstrung 9mo ago
  This wasn't a16z monolithically speaking as a firm, it was Anish Acharya talking on a podcast. Seems like he's focused on fintech and not involved in many of their LLM investments
duzer65657 9mo ago
>> Anish Acharya says it is not worth it to use AI-assisted coding for all business functions. AI should focus on core business development, not rebuilding enterprise software. I don't even know what this means, but my take: we should stop listening to VCs (especially those like A16Z) who have an obvious vested interest that doesn't match the rest of society. Granting these people an audience is totally unwarranted; nobody but other tech bros said "we will vibe code everything" in the first place. Best case scenario: they all go to the same exclusive conference, get the branded conference technical vest and that's were the asteroid hits.
7777777phil 9mo ago
Even a16z is walking this back now. I wrote about why the “vibe code everything” thesis doesn’t hold up in two recent pieces: (1) https://philippdubach.com/posts/the-saaspocalypse-paradox/ https://philippdubach.com/posts/the-saaspocalypse-paradox/ (2) https://philippdubach.com/posts/the-impossible-backhand/ https://philippdubach.com/posts/the-impossible-backhand/ Acharya’s framing is different from mine (he’s talking book on software stocks) but the conclusion is the same: the “innovation bazooka” pointed at rebuilding payroll is a bad allocation of resources. Benedict Evans called me out on LinkedIn for this (https://philippdubach.com/posts/is-ai-really-eating-the-world-1/2/ https://philippdubach.com/posts/is-ai-really-eating-the-worl...) take, which I take as a sign the argument is landing..
- selridge 9mo ago
  > Benedict Evans called me out on LinkedIn for this take, which I take as a sign the argument is landing. Excellent. And correct lol.
  - crsv 9mo ago
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- mrwh 9mo ago
  > investors are simultaneously punishing hyperscaler stocks because AI capex might generate weak returns, while destroying software stocks because AI adoption will be so pervasive it renders all existing software obsolete. Both cannot hold simultaneously. I don't understand this point. Can't it be possible that the ultimate effect is to devalue, hugely, software? As in it can totally both be true that AI capex has weak returns and at the same time most SaaS companies go bankrupt. To take an analogy: if ever we manage to successfully mine asteroids, and find some vast quantity of platinum, it could both be true that every existing platinum miner loses their shirt, and also that the value of platinum sinks so far that the asteroid mining company cannot cover its costs.
  - re-thc 9mo ago
    SaaS companies were just overvalued. They had crazy multiples. Not even an AI thing.
alephnerd 9mo ago
Both AI Fanatics and AI Luddites need to touch grass. We work in Software ENGINEERING. Engineering is all about what tools makes sense to solve a specific problem. In some cases, AI tools do show immediate business value (eg. TTS for SDR) and in other cases this is less obvious. This is all the more reason why learning about AI/ML fundamentals is critical in the same way understanding computer architecture, systems programming, algorithms, and design principles are critical to being a SWE, because then you can make a data-driven judgment on whether an approach works or not. Given the number of throwaway accounts that commented, it clearly struck a nerve.
- rsrsrs86 9mo ago
  The irony is, AI coding only works after and if you put a lot of work on engineering, like creating a factory.
  - alephnerd 9mo ago
    There is a lot of work that goes on before even reaching the point to write code. For example, being able to vibecode a UI wireframe instead of being blocked for 2 sprints by your UI/UX team or templating an alpha to gauge customer interest in 1 week instead of 1 quarter is a massive operational improvement. Of course these aren't completed products, but customers in most cases can accept such performance in the short-to-medium term or if it is part of an alpha. This is why I keep repeating ad nauseum that most decisionmakers don't expect AI to replace jobs. The reality is, professional software engineering is about translating business requirements into tangible products. It's not the codebase that matters in most cases - it's the requirements and outcomes that do. Like you can refactor and prettify your codebase all you want, but if it isn't directly driving customer revenue or value, then that time could be better spent elsewhere. It's the usecase that your product enables which is why they are purchasing your product.
    - rsrsrs86 9mo ago
      As a researcher in formal methods, I totally get you
atomic128 9mo ago
Sounds like a16z has some rapidly depreciating software equity they want to sell you. Or maybe they own the debt. Listen to some of the Marc Andreessen interviews promoting cryptocurrency in 2021. Do that and you will never listen to him or his associates again.
- rsrsrs86 9mo ago
  They don’t make money by being right, they make money by exposing LPs to risk. Zero commitment to insight. Intellectual production goes only so far as to attract funding.
  - bigbuppo 9mo ago
    Also... they don't make money by promoting things that are good ideas that make sense. That's why every lucky billionaire tech bro that gets into VC ultimately invests in smart toilets. Ultimately, they just keep putting money into each slot machine they can find until one of them pays out a jackpot. Eventually one of them will make up for all the other losses.
tombert 9mo ago
I dunno. I really hate the expression "the new normal", because it sort of smuggles in the assumption that there exists such thing as "normal". It always felt like one of those truisms that people say to exploit emotions like "in these trying times" or "no one wants to work anymore". But I really do think that vibe coding is the "new normal". These tools are already extremely useful, to a point where I don't really think we'll be able to go back. These tools are getting good enough that it's getting to a point where you have to use them. This might sound like I'm supportive of this, and I guess am to some extent, but I find it to be exceedingly disappointing because writing software isn't fun anymore. One of my most upvoted comments on HN talks about how I don't enjoy programming, but instead I enjoy problem solving. This was written before I was aware of vibe coding stuff, and I think I was wrong. I guess I actually did enjoy the process of writing the code, instead of just delegating my work to a virtual intern while I just watch the AI do the fun stuff. A very small part of me is kind of hoping that once AI has to be priced at "not losing money on every call" levels that I'll be forced to actually think about this stuff again.
- syndacks 9mo ago
  I largely agree with you. And, given your points about “not going back” — how do you propose interviewing SWEs?
  - tombert 9mo ago
    I have thought about this a lot, and I have no idea. I work for an "AI-first" company, and we're kind of required to use AI stuff as often as we can, so I make very liberal use of Codex, but I've been shielded from the interview process thus far. I think I would still kind of ask the same questions, though maybe a bit more conceptual. Like, for example, I might see if I could get someone to explain how to build something, and then ask them about data structures that might be useful (e.g. removing a lock by making an append-only structure). I find that Codex will generally generate something that "works" but without an understanding data structures and algorithms, its implementation will still be somewhat sub-optimal, meaning that understanding the fundamentals has value, at least for now.
j45 9mo ago
Just because we can code something faster or cheaper doesn't increase the odds it will be right.
- falcor84 9mo ago
  Arguably it does, because being able to experience something gives you much more insight into whether it's right or not - so being able to iterate quickly many times, continuously updating your spec and definition of done should help you get to the right solution. To be clear, there is still effort involved, but the effort becomes more about the critical evaluation rather than the how.
  - packetlost 9mo ago
    But that's not the only problem. To illustrate, I'll share what I'm working on now. My companies ops guy vibe coded a bunch of scripts to manage deployments. On the surface, they appear to do the correct thing. Except they don't. The tag for the Docker image used is hardcoded in a yaml file and doesn't get updated anywhere unless you do it manually. The docs don't even mention half of the necessary scripts/commands or implicit setup necessary for any of it to work in the first place, much less the tags or how any of it actually works. There are two completely different deployment strategies (direct to VM with docker + GCP and a GKE-based K8s deploy). Neither fully work, and only one has any documentation at all (and that documentation is completely vibed, so has very low information density). The only reason I'm able to use this pile of garbage at all is because I already know how all of the independent pieces function and can piece it together, but that's after wasting several hours of "why the fuck aren't my changes having an effect." There are very, very few lines of code that don't matter in well architected systems, but many that don't in vibed systems. We already have huge problems with overcomplicated crap made exclusively by humans, that's been hard enough to manage. Vibe coding consistently gives the illusion of progress by fixing an immediate problem at the expense of piling on crap that obscures what's actually going on and often breaks exiting functionality. It's frankly not sustainable. That being said, I've gotten some utility out of vibe coding tools, but it mostly just saves me some mental effort of writing boring shit that isn't interesting, innovative, or enjoyable, which is like 20% of mental effort and 5% of my actual work. I'm not even going to get started on the context switching costs. It makes my ADHD feel happy but I'm confident I'm less productive because of the secondary effects.
godelski 9mo ago
Let's just look at Dijkstra's On the Foolishness of "Natural Language Programming". It really does a good job at explaining why natural language programming (and thus, Vibe Coding) is a dead end. It serves as a good reminder that we developed the languages of Math and Programming for a reason. The pedantic nature is a feature, not a flaw. It is because in programming (and math) we are dealing with high levels of abstraction constantly and thus ambiguity compounds. Isn't this something we learn early on as programmers? That a computer does exactly what you tell it to, not what you intend to tell it to? Think about how that phrase extends when we incorporate LLM Coding Agents. | The virtue of formal texts is that their manipulations, in order to be legitimate, need to satisfy only a few simple rules; they are, when you come to think of it, an amazingly effective tool for ruling out all sorts of nonsense that, when we use our native tongues, are almost impossible to avoid. - Dijkstra All of you have experienced the ambiguity and annoyances of natural language. Have you ever: - Had a boss give you confusing instructions? - Argued with someone only to find you agree? - Talked with someone and one of you doesn't actually understand the other? - Talked with someone and the other person seems batshit insane but they also seem to have avoided a mental asylum? - Use different words to describe the same thing? - When standing next to someone and looking at the same thing? - Adapted your message so you "talk to your audience"? - Ever read/wrote something on the internet? (where "everyone" is the audience) Congrats, you have experienced the frustrations and limitations of natural language. Natural language is incredibly powerful and the ambiguity is a feature and a flaw, just like how in formal languages the precision is both a feature and a flaw. I mean it can take an incredible amount of work to say even very simple and obvious things with formal languages[1], but the ambiguity disappears[2]. Vibe Coding has its uses and I'm sure that'll expand, but the idea of it replacing domain experts is outright laughable. You can't get it to resolve ambiguity if you aren't aware of the ambiguity. If you've ever argued with the LLM take a step back and ask yourself, is there ambiguity? It'll help you resolve the problem and make you recognize the limits. I mean just look at the legal system, that is probably one of the most serious efforts to create formalization in natural language and we still need lawyers and judges to sit around and argue all day about all the ambiguity that remains. I seriously can't comprehend how on a site who's primary users are programmers this is an argument. If we somehow missed this in our education (formal or self) then how do we not intuit it from our everyday interactions? [0] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667.html https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principia_Mathematica https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principia_Mathematica [2] Most programming languages are some hybrid variant. e.g. Python uses duck typing: if it looks like a float, operates like a float, and works as a float, then it is probably a float. Or another example even is C, what used to be called a "high level programming language" (so is Python a celestial language?). Give up some precision/lack of ambiguity for ease.
benreesman 9mo ago
Vibecoding is a net wealth transfer from frightened people to unscrupulous people. Machine assisted rigorous software engineering is an even bigger wealth transfer from unscrupulous people to passionate computer scientists.
- rsrsrs86 9mo ago
  Sadly, this is the most serious comment here. People who are not shocked are people who haven’t seen what a highly educated computer scientist can do in single player mode.
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theturtletalks 9mo ago
All these articles seem to think people will vibe code by prompting: make me my own Stripe make me my own Salesforce make me my own Shopify It will be more like: Look at how Lago, an open-source Stripe layer, works and make it work with Authorized.net directly Look at Twenty, an open-source CRM, and make it work in our tech stack for our sales needs Look at how Medusa, an open-source e-commerce platform, works and what features we would need and bring into our website When doing the latter, getting a good enough alternative will reduce the need for commercial SaaS. On top of that, these commercial SaaS are bloated with features in their attempt to work with as many use cases as possible and configuring them is “coding” by another name. Throw in Enshittification and the above seems to the next logical move by companies looking to move off these apps.
- whatever1 9mo ago
  So maybe the saas will pivot to just sell some barebone agents that include their real IP? The rest (UI, dashboards and connectivity) will be tailored made by LLMs
- selridge 9mo ago
  The right move is this, turned to 11. Velocity or one-shot capability isn't the move. It's making stuff that used to be traumatic just...normal now. Google fucking vibe-coded their x86 -> ARM ISA changeover. It never would have been done without agents. Not like "google did it X% faster." Google would have let that sit forever because the labor economics of the problem were backwards. That doesn't MATTER anymore. If you have some scratch, some halfway decent engineers, and a clear idea, you can build stuff that was just infeasible or impossible. all it takes is time and care. Some people have figured this out and are moving now.
  - theturtletalks 9mo ago
    Exactly, if the engineers know where to look for the solution in open-source code and point the AI there, it will get them there. Even if the language or the tech stack are different, AI is excellent at finding the seams, those spots where a feature connects to the underlying tech stack, and figuring out how the feature is really implemented, and bringing that over.
manoDev 9mo ago
People are overestimating the value on having AI create something given loose instructions, and underestimating the value of using AI as a tool for a human to learn and explore a problem space. The bias shows on the terminology (“agents”). We finally made the computer able to speak “our” language - but we still see computers as just automation. There’s a lot of untapped potential in the other direction, in encoding and compressing knowledge IMO.
- georgeecollins 9mo ago
  Right! It's like maybe the AI is more of a threat to the accounts payable person than the accounts payable software. At least in terms of head count.
- fsddd 9mo ago
  Problem space is rich. The thing doesnt actually know what a problem is. The thing is incredibly good at searching through large spaces of information.
  - consumer451 9mo ago
    42
    - fsddd 9mo ago
      Not sure what you mean by that lol
      - consumer451 9mo ago
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        deleted 9mo ago
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      - consumer451 9mo ago
rsrsrs86 9mo ago
I hear and read so much shit by VCs. Both in LinkedIn and in private meetings. Specially Menlo says a lot of shit (check LinkedIn). Deloitte and McKinsey, also full of crap. Really. Vcs are choke full of companies that can be cloned over night, SaaS companies that will face ridiculously fast substitution, and a whoooole lotta capital deployed on lousy RAGs and OpenAI Wrappers.
- bigbuppo 9mo ago
  The bullshit people love the bullshit generators.
NinjaTrance 9mo ago
The possibility that anyone can easily replicate any startup scares A16Z.
- toomuchtodo 9mo ago
  This is what always confused me about VC AI enthusiasm. Their moat is the capital. As AI improves, it destroys their moat. And yet, they are stoked to invest in it, the architects of their own demise.
  - ironhaven 9mo ago
    Don't you have that backwards? If AI gets so good that it can replace all human labor, will capital like money and data centers be the only moat left?
    - georgemcbay 9mo ago
      > If AI gets so good that it can replace all human labor, will capital like money and data centers be the only moat left? If AI gets good enough to replace all human labor then actual physical moats to keep the hungry, rioting replaced humans away will be the most important moats.
      - satvikpendem 9mo ago
        Which is bought by money in the first place, see billionaire doomsday bunkers. The poor will not have such a bunker.
        acuozzo 9mo ago
        Unless they intend on generating their own oxygen to breathe, I don't see how these bunkers stand a chance.
        satvikpendem 9mo ago
45dsilicon 9mo ago
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upmind 9mo ago
A16Zs opinion is worthless to me, they know very little about the market. Furthermore, they're notorious for having a lot of "partners".
- mountainriver 9mo ago
  Their whole game is just pump and dump
- SilverElfin 9mo ago
  Has everyone forgotten about when they pumped absurd crypto scams like NFTs
- neom 9mo ago
  Depends on the partner, Peter Levine is a pretty damn good picker (supported us series A to IPO). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_J._Levine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_J._Levine
- thenaturalist 9mo ago
  Pretty worthless take posting an ad-hominem attack instead of addressing the actual content of the article/ statement.
newzino 9mo ago
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dnautics 9mo ago
you cant easily vibecode everything. in my startup this is what I am not buying (and vibecoding): - JIRA/trello/monday.com - benchling - obsidian this is what i buy and have no intent to replace: - carta - docusign - gusto/rippling - bank this is what might be on the chopping block: - gsuite
- rogerrogerr 9mo ago
  Why not Docusign? Not challenging, just curious why that is specifically on your list. Reputation?
  - dnautics 9mo ago
    the common factor was sort of left as an exercise to the reader to think about moats in the age of AI... but basically anything that has touchpoints to the legal and financial systems im not gonna touch with a 20 ft vibecoded pole.
  - Ekaros 9mo ago
    Sometimes value is not in the code or the product. But the fact that leg work is done and something is generally accepted for the purpose. For me it looks like type of product where the pain is not making the software. It is getting everyone you will deal with to agree that software is acceptable.
- levkk 9mo ago
  I'm curious about your reasoning. Jira/Trello etc. are like $10/mo/seat, why bother rewriting them from scratch? You'll spend more in tokens doing so. Same for gmail/google calendar, what's the ROI? Those tools are reliable and cheap, why bother creating your own?
  - dnautics 9mo ago
    jira/trello: ergonomics. to set them up correctly exactly the way i want would take me 20 hours (or hire a PM), i can vibecode for 20h and get the same result. plus, being able to crossref internal data types is chef's kiss. im paying for claude pro so it's use it or lose it. when i finish everything and have it battle tested i can end my claude code. and anyways when i have 10 employees, it's parity. for gsuite: i want to own everything internally eventually ans having internal xrefs will be nice. the gsuite data is incidental, what is truly valuable about gsuite is spam detection and the oauth capability
Rastonbury 9mo ago
Anyone who's seen an enterprise deal close or dealt with enterprise customer requests will know this, the build vs buy calculus has always been there yet companies still buy. Until you can get AI to the point where it equivalent to a 20 person engineering team, people are not going to build their own Snowflake, Salesforce, Slack or ATS. Maybe that day is 3 years away but when that happens the world will be very different
- designerarvid 9mo ago
  Companies do make/buy decisions on everything, it just software. Cleaning services are not expensive, yet companies contract them instead of hiring staff. This is called transaction cost economics, if anyone’s interested.
- bensyverson 9mo ago
  I agree generally, but some of these enterprise contracts are eye-watering. If the choice is $2M/year with a 3-year minimum contract, or rolling your own, I think calculus really has shifted. With that said, the entire business world does not understand that software is more than just code. Even if you could write code instantly, making enterprise software would still take time, because there are simply so many high-stakes decisions to make, and so much fractal detail.
  - nicoburns 9mo ago
    > If the choice is $2M/year with a 3-year minimum contract, or rolling your own, I think calculus really has shifted. But why? It was always dramatically cheaper for enterprises to build rather than buy. They stopped doing that becuase they did that in the 90s and ended up with legacy codebases that they didn't know how to maintain. I can't see AI helping with that.
    - etothepii 9mo ago
      This might be the biggest benefit of AI coding. If I have a large legacy code base I can use AI to ask questions and find out where certain things are happening. This benefit is huge even if I choose not to vibe code anything. It ends up feeling a lot like the engineer that wrote the code is still with you or documented everything very well. In the real world there is a risk that documentation is wrong or that the engineer misremembers some detail so even the occasional hallucination is not a particularly big risk.
random3 9mo ago
AI is eating the software https://a16z.com/why-software-is-eating-the-world/ https://a16z.com/why-software-is-eating-the-world/
bhewes 9mo ago
Why is it bad for AI to replace an enterprise software layer? Other than invalidating past investments.
- captainbland 9mo ago
  A few reasons, "AI" as used by non-experts often has correctness and security issues. Even when it doesn't, its outputs are often not reproducible/predictable because they're probabilistic systems. AI systems are also prone to writing code which they can't effectively refactor themselves, implying that many of these code bases are fiscal time bombs where human experts are required to come fix them. If the service being replaced has transactional behaviour, does the AI produced solution? Does the person using it know what that means? The other side is that AI as an industry still needs to recoup trillions in investment, and enterprise users are potential whales for that. Good prices in AI systems today are not guaranteed to last because even with hardware improvements these systems need to make money back that has been invested in them.
  - tehjoker 9mo ago
    Some of that latter part depends on how good and cheap open weight systems get. The ability to deploy your own will strictly limit the price of closed models if they aren't dominant in functionality.
ManuelKiessling 9mo ago
There was a short moment in history where it seemed that the sentiment was: people will soon 3D-print 99% of their household items themselves instead of buying them. You absolutely could print things like cups, soap holders, picture frames, the small shovel you use for gardening, and so on an so on. 99% of people still just buy this stuff.
- throwaway314155 9mo ago
  That has more to do with the shortcomings of 3d printing.
  - klardotsh 9mo ago
    I think some or maybe even many of those shortcomings will apply to software, too. Making actual good software is not as trivial as writing “make me an app”, much as making an actual good spoon is not as trivial as throwing an STL at a printer and calling it a day.
  - alfiedotwtf 9mo ago
    Are you saying vibed code doesn’t have shortcomings
thomasjudge 9mo ago
"aol.com"?
obiefernandez 9mo ago
I just recreated most of Linear for my company in a few days. Making it hyper specific to what we want (metrics driven, lean startup style). All state changes are made with MCP so it saved me from having to spend time on any forms and most interactions other than filtering searching sorting etc. Means we will be ditching Linear soon. I know I’m an outlier but this sort of thing will get more common.
- satvikpendem 9mo ago
  I don't understand this because who's gonna maintain it in the future? Surely that costs more to pay even one person to add features that Linear had than to pay Linear themselves. I'd do this for personal projects but never for my work company lest I be the one to maintain it indefinitely on top of my current work.
  - pizzly 9mo ago
    one thing annoying with premade solutions is that it only does 90% of what you want, its livable but still doesn't quite meet your needs. Its not just adding features that Linear already provides but adding features and integrations that mets 100% your needs. The full decision making equation is (cost of implementing it yourself + cost of maintenance + 10% additional benefit for a solution that fully meets your needs) versus (cost of preexisting solution that meets 90% of your needs). Cost of implementing it and cost of maintenance has just gone down. Surely that will mean on a whole more people as a whole will choose to make inhouse rather than outsource. Thus demand for premade solutions will go down, Saas providers won't be able to increase their prices as this will make even more people choose to implement it themselves. The cost of producing software will continue to drop due to agentic coding and maintenance cost will drop as well due to maintenance coding agents. More people will choose their own custom solutions and so on. Its very possible we are in the beginning of the end for Saas companies.
    - satvikpendem 9mo ago
      I think even with vibe coding people definitely still underestimate the stuff mentioned in this comment about IaaS: > server operations, storage, scalability, backups, security, compliance, etc https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47097450 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47097450
boznz 9mo ago
Never say never, vibe coding is not even 4 years old.
kristianp 9mo ago
> He said that software accounts for 8% to 12% of a company's expenses, so using vibe coding to build the company's resource planning or payroll tools would only save about 10%. Relying on AI to write code also carries risks, he said. > "You have this innovation bazooka with these models. Why would you point it at rebuilding payroll or ERP or CRM," Acharya said > Instead, companies are better off using AI to develop their core businesses or optimize the remaining 90% of their costs
dabinat 9mo ago
The bottleneck will always be humans. You could get AI to write a million lines of code a day, but you’d still need humans to review and test that code. We are a very long way from being able to blindly trust AI’s outputs in production.
- mephitix 9mo ago
  IMO I would have agreed with this statement 2 months ago but now it’s clear AI is already much better at reviewing and even testing code (via spinning up simulators, etc) much better than we can. We’re already using AI’s outputs in production and not writing much code these days.
  - andrekandre 9mo ago
    > AI is already much better at reviewing and even testing for code in isolation, perhaps, but how does it know what is correct for what the customer wants/needs?
    - acuozzo 9mo ago
      > how does it know what is correct for what the customer wants/needs? The way NASA does it so that they can trust deliverables from the lowest bidder. That is, have developers translate the wants/needs into detailed contracts of work.
      - deleted 9mo ago
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- cal_dent 9mo ago
  I don’t even think it’s about reviewing and testing. The bottleneck will always be humans. We don’t like to always admit it but most jobs are fairly straightforward, as in the actual day to day tasks. Yes being smart is great and useful etc. but after a certain point it’s diminishing returns on the actual tasks you have to do. Dealing with other humans and their egos and eccentricities and the multitude ways each person sees the world is always what makes all jobs tricky. I suspect this whole ai wave/hype/reality is going to open many people’s eyes to this. We will laugh that we use to call them “soft” skills.
bitwize 9mo ago
Well, yeah. Vibe coding as in letting AI one-shot an app with a vague description still doesn't work except on trivial, throwaway stuff. But... spec-driven development with automated stepwise refinement by agents recursively generating, testing, and improving the code is how software engineering is done in the late 2020s.
- klardotsh 9mo ago
  You write that in italics as if to imply it’s a law that cannot be questioned. Quite a number of shops do not engineer software like that, or only engineer software like that where it fits the environment the software lives in, or otherwise sit at numerous points along the gradient between “software engineering as it has been known for decades” and “fully computer generated software”.
  - bitwize 9mo ago
    The laws of scale are stone cold bitches, and so you really don't need a weatherman to tell which way the wind is blowing. By 2030 writing code by hand in an IDE will almost certainly be a curiosity for retro enthusiasts, like programming a C64 in BASIC is now. The field as a profession will be unrecognizable and, as things become more automated and even self-improving, have far fewer people working in it, by 2030.
alun 9mo ago
> "You have this innovation bazooka with these models. Why would you point it at rebuilding payroll or ERP or CRM" Most SaaS companies are just expensive wrappers on top of existing tools. For non-VC-funded companies, SaaS tools are a serious cost. If you can re-create them in-house with AI, why wouldn't you? The result is saving capital (which you can then employ to do the more innovative things), and being in control over your own data.
- nofriend 9mo ago
  If this is actually viable, then SaaS will (be forced to) lower costs until it is no longer worthwhile.
  - alun 9mo ago
    Yup, it becomes a race to the bottom. And honestly that's a good thing, everyone hates paying for all of these subscriptions.
anonzzzies 9mo ago
> "You have this innovation bazooka with these models. Why would you point it at rebuilding payroll or ERP or CRM" They invested in ERP/CRM? I built one (fairly complete to the German/Italy/EU tax system) and it saves a ton of money vs commercial offerings. So yeah, of course we will.
AbstractH24 9mo ago
I once built a CRM in Google Sheets fully mirroring the data model of Salesforce. For contact, company, deal, and call tracking for a one sales rep business. (Before XLookup was in Google Sheets) Did it work? Yes. Was it worth my time to maintain and scale the “platform” with the company rather than outsource all that to a CRM company? Not at all. Time is finite. Spend your time doing what you do best, pay others to do what they do best.
- WheelsAtLarge 9mo ago
  Yup, my experience has been that vibe-coding is very time-consuming. It reminds me very much of how LLMs are great at creating mind-blowing images, but you get what you get. Once you decide that you need to modify the image you get, it becomes a time sink. You might be able to change it and get what you need, but there is no guarantee and it's a never ending task. The same thing happens with code; you may get great results from your prompt, but trying to customize it will drive you nuts and you may never get what you want. Maintenance is another hurdle. How do you maintain code you might not have the skills to maintain? Vibe-coding may reduce software creation time, but it's not taking over software engineering. The SaaS business is going nowhere. Most people, by far, will continue to rely on someone else for their software needs. But be very aware that the software business will change. We are seeing that already.
- stingrae 9mo ago
  It doesn't make sense for every company to make their own Salesforce clone. The key is that it makes new companies entering the market to compete with Salesforce immensely easier. More competition will just force lower overall margins in SAAS.
  - hippo22 9mo ago
    It's not really that hard to make a Salesforce clone now though. Writing the software was never the hard part of building a business.
    - ncallaway 9mo ago
zhubert 9mo ago
I can’t believe I’m responding to an AOL article, but… You don’t understand what’s happening if you dismiss the leverage provided by AI as “vibe coding”.
aobdev 9mo ago
Thought exercise for those in disagreement: why would every company use AI to build their own payroll/ERP/CRM, when just a handful of companies could use AI to build those offerings better? This is largely how things work now; AI may lower the cost and increase margins, but the economics of build vs buy seem the same.
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 9mo ago
  Well the answer is because the cost of that software is lower than somebody building the other software. What happens is that all these SaaS drop in value because it is now realistic to build them internally
  - aobdev 9mo ago
    Why does AI make it cheaper to build internal but not cheaper for SaaS competitors to pop up? Everyone has access to the same tools.
    - copperx 9mo ago
      It does make it cheaper, obviously. But the barrier to entry is almost zero, like panhandling. That's why it can't substitute a job.
    - Fire-Dragon-DoL 9mo ago
      Oh sure! My conclusion is that they will drop in value, not disappear. Basically I expect way smaller companies popping up competing with the big ones and their offering will be priced way lower because their payroll is way smaller. While there is no competitor, internal tools will pop up now.
      - aobdev 9mo ago
        I believe that. Companies will build cheap tools today while competitors are spinning up to undercut ADP, Salesforce, and SAP. But what happens tomorrow? There are plenty of examples in IT today where the reasonable option is to outsource in 90% of cases: don’t roll your own auth, don’t host your own email server, don’t build your own data center. I don’t see how AI can change that, when the people who build specialized software also have access to AI. Another great example is open source. I think PostgreSQL being free and usable by everyone is a more economic outcome than every Fortune 500 company building their own database engine. Payroll, ERP, and CRM fall into the same category of being commodity software in a lot of cases.
martinald 9mo ago
I sort of agree with this, but what a lot of people are missing is it's unbelievably easy to clone a lot of SaaS products. So I think big SaaS products are under attack from three angles now: 1) People replacing certain systems with 'vibe coded' ones, for either cost/feature/unhappiness with vendor reasons. I actually think this is a bigger threat than people think - there are so many BAD SaaS products out there which cost businesses a fortune in poor features/bugs/performance/uptime, and if the models/agents keep improving the way they have in the last couple of years it's going to be very interesting if some sort of '1000x' engineer in an agent can do crazy impressive stuff. 2) Agents 'replacing' the software. As people have pointed out, just have the agent use APIs to do whatever workflow you want - ping a database and output a report. 3) "Cheap" clones of existing products. A tiny team can now clone a "big" SaaS product very quickly. These guys can provide support/infra/migration assistance and make money at a much lower price point. Even if there is lock in, it makes it harder for SaaS companies to keep price pressure up.
- sebastos 9mo ago
  Insightful points! It would be interesting if, with all the anxiety about vibe coding becoming the new normal, its only lasting effect is the emergence of smaller B2B companies that quickly razzle dazzle together a bespoke replacement for Concur, SAP, Workday, the crappy company sharepoint - whatever. Reminds me of what people say Palantir is doing, but now supercharged by the AI-driven workflows to stand up the “forward deployed” “solution” even faster.
  - martinald 9mo ago
    Thanks,yes exactly what I think. Or an industry specific Workday, with all of workdays features but aimed at a niche vertical. I wrote about this (including an approach on how to clone apps with HAR files and agents) if you are interested. https://martinalderson.com/posts/attack-of-the-clones/ https://martinalderson.com/posts/attack-of-the-clones/
- harrall 9mo ago
  But have you ever tried to clone a product or tool for yourself before? At first it’s great because you think that you saved money but then you start having to maintain it… fixing problems, filling in gaps… you now realize that you made a mistake. Just because AI can do it now doesn’t mean you aren’t just now having to use AI to do the same thing… Also, agents are not deterministic. If you use it to analyze data, it will get it right most of the time but, once in a blue moon, it will make shit up, except you can’t tell which time it was. You could make it deterministic by having AI write a tool instead… except you now have the first problem of maintaining a tool. That isn’t to say that there isn’t small low hanging fruit that AI will replace, but it’s a bit different when you need a real product with support. At the end of the day, you hire a plumber or use a SaaS not because you can’t do it yourself, but because you don’t want to do it and rather want someone else who is committed to it to handle it.
seg_lol 9mo ago
I cannot believe there has been no mention of things like n8n, activepieces and windmill in this thread. SaaS will utterly collapse in 18 months. https://github.com/n8n-io/n8n https://github.com/n8n-io/n8n https://github.com/activepieces/activepieces https://github.com/activepieces/activepieces https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill
umairnadeem123 9mo ago
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atlgator 9mo ago
"You have this innovation bazooka. Why would you point it at rebuilding payroll?" — a partner at the firm whose thesis was literally "software is eating the world." Apparently the meal is over and now we're just rearranging the plates.
- plaidfuji 9mo ago
  My first thought as well - they suddenly realized they have an interest in AI not cannibalizing their existing SaaS portfolio
zmmmmm 9mo ago
It seems to be premised on the idea we would vibe code a replica of what we get from SaaS. But the real point is, we would not do that. We would vibe code something that exactly fits our business. We have products we're paying $100k a year for and using 3% of the functionality. And they suck. This is the target.
ozgrakkurt 9mo ago
..said the guy, who doesn’t code anyway
jazzpush2 9mo ago
A16z partners don't know shit. Brain dead nepo-babies - how's Cluely?
ookblah 9mo ago
a lot of low level ops stuff is going to be eaten up imo. half the bullshit you have to deal with is integrating data across every platform you are using or other supposed products to help you integrate the integrators lol. i guess if you're a huge company with 1000s of people this is an inherent problem anyway, one you can spend millions of dollars on. it's not just "replace snowflake", there are a lot of times i wish i could build a very focused thing to accelerate some of our internal workflows and the nocode solutions either were too simplistic that you ended up spending just as much time trying to wrangle some generic solution to your own use case. OR it was not worth throwing significant engineering resources behind internal ops stuff. now that barrier is dropping fast and it's feasible for us. whoever can create the framework/tooling for people build their own systems will win this, but i don't think it's something that can be "productized" like a saas.
ChicagoDave 9mo ago
The buy vs build discussion has dramatically changed with GenAI. Some enterprise systems need to remain vendor based, but there’s a ton of space for mid-size and smaller companies to build and maintain their own systems and tons of software that were excel apps could be fully realized departmental systems.
- onion2k 9mo ago
  That's a short term view. Any system you build inhouse has to be maintained until you replace it, and often the longer it remains in place the harder it is to do that. You might save a small amount of cash (which might be important at the time tbf) but you're creating a major headache for later. Legacy code is debt, and that includes all your code. It's also a huge problem if the maintainer leaves because typically those small systems are owned by an individual dev who set it up in the first place. Everyone who founds a company needs to remember that they're building a system of systems that all interact and influence each other, and you have to balance short term cash flow against long term strategy.
  - PacificSpecific 9mo ago
    I don't understand why you appear to be downvoted for this (your comment is faded at the time I'm reading this). It sounds like a perfectly reasonable take. I've certainly inherited and also caused these problems in my younger years.
  - aleph_minus_one 9mo ago
    > It's also a huge problem if the maintainer leaves because typically those small systems are owned by an individual dev who set it up in the first place. It's not uncommon that this maintainer actually wants to get away from maintaining this code, and would actually be quite willing to teach some successor how everything works. The problem is that it is often hard to find someone who is similarly passionate about this system (often the system only keeps working because the original maintainer invests a lot of energy into keeping it alive), and is thus brutally willing to learn this system inside out. You can't force this mentality from above: either a suitable programmer has this mentality or he is typically not suitable.
saidnooneever 9mo ago
its the same as why roads are still built by hand a lot and houses etc.. it is not needed to automate everything. some joys should not be automated away, people wont let them be either way. the world could be much more optimal in .any place, but its boring, so the optimisations go elsewhere.
didntknowyou 9mo ago
so are they saying this based on their analysis, or because they are trying to stir up support for a non-vibe-coding startup they have have invested.
koliber 9mo ago
Using vibe coding to build a small specialized tool for a small company that can be used instead of single feature of a commercial SaaS is doable and brings value. Using vibe coding to build something to replace an enterprise SaaS offering for a medium to large company is not something to be taken lightly. The tool and the code is not everything. The operating environment, security guarantees, SLAs, support, and a bag of features you don't need today but might tomorrow is what the SaaS offerings bring to the table. Imagine that I run a really good software house. I can literally build anything you want, feature wise, better than most. I do it quickly. You come to me and say you want to replace Slack for your team of 200, because Slack got too expensive. I say I can do it. Because I am feeling generous and you're my good friend, I will do it for free. However, I will just give you the code, a CI/CD script, and a README.md file. I will disappear and will not maintain or support your software, nor will I give you any guarantees on how well it will work, other than a "trust me." I wouldn't take the offer.
- zozbot234 9mo ago
  The Matrix folks have covered the "replace Slack internal chat" case already. They will give you the code so that you can bring the service up internally, or you can use any 3rd party hosted solution that provides the usual support and "enterprise" guarantees, for a price. Why can't this model generalize to sector-specific SaaS offerings that can now be prototyped cheaply via AI vibecoding?
  - cowpig 9mo ago
    Zulip is an actual slack upgrade
    - notpushkin 9mo ago
      Or Mattermost, or Rocket.Chat, or... there’s tons of alternatives now. That’s not the point.
  - kelnos 9mo ago
    As much as the Slack UX has somewhat enshittified at this point, the UX of Matrix is still so so so far behind Slack that it's often not even worth considering. I hear Zulip could actually be a real alternative, though I have no experience with it.
MantraHQ 9mo ago
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kwar13 9mo ago
aol.com...? wow what year is this
rhubarbtree 9mo ago
AI assisted coding is going to make it easier to create software. Developers will be more productive. Non developers will be able to create some stuff. What this means is that very simple apps will become easy to create quickly. So a todo manager is probably not going to be a very successful business. You’ll be competing with many many people and it will be commoditised. But ultimately what happens here is the “complexity threshold” of a sufficiently complex product needed to make money will be raised. Existing products will become more sophisticated or, if there is not more “sophistication ladder to climb” then they will be commoditised. There’s just no way people are going to vibe all their software, that’s a very self absorbed nerd take. But on the supply side we’ll see commoditisation, price drops, and increasingly good value for the user as features are shipped faster. I also think that software quality is really going to tank, because using validation to test the output of Claude is not a good way to ensure quality or correctness. It’ll get you some of the way but you need powerful reasoning. The most obvious evidence for this is security flaws in AI code. We’ll see a new era of enshitification caused by AI code. Like outsourced manufacturing though, people will buy worse stuff at a cheaper price. That makes me sad, because I thought we were on a path to better software, not buggier software.
lpeancovschi 9mo ago
One who thinks that complex software can be "vibe coded", hasn't worked on complex codebases.
- funkyfiddler369 9mo ago
  it can but it will take one person just as long as a small team without "AI" and that one person will carry all the frustration, doubt, all the to do lists and imaginary pin boards and all that other stuff programmers carry around in their heads, at work and back home. have fun with all that. side note: indie games are not complex software. and most "overvalued" and "impossible" and "walking it back now" comments are true in as many cases as they are not true and I really do not understand these commenters. smart people should not fall into the same category as people who think that "nobody cares" because they never met devoted lawyers, investigative journalists and law enforcers passionate about justice AND law. it's all so weird, man ...
- aleph_minus_one 9mo ago
  > One who thinks that complex software can be "vibe coded", hasn't worked on complex codebases. I do think that I have worked on somewhat complex code bases. The reason why they are complicated is often "political" (e.g. at some point it was decided that this is the way to go, and from then on the specific abstraction was used. It turned out these wishes were not a good idea, but the code was never re-developed with a "more proper" architecture (also for the reason that removing some insanely convoluted feature would anger some users)). I see no reason why some (hypothetical) AI couldn't come up with a much better architecture (also good programmers are capable of this). The problem is rather "getting this architecture through politically"; for some reason "AI suggested/created it" is much more socially accepted by managers than "programmer X considers this change to be necessary" (I cannot understand why).
ars-machina 9mo ago
Using non-deterministic LLMs to vibe code applications is a “workshop” activity - meaning it is iterative and the greater the complexity, the more complex it is to workshop the fixes. At some stage you realize that while you’re blown away by how sophisticated the LLM is, playing go-fish with it is a larger time suck than you expected. It’s like being asked to read a friend’s term paper only to find it’s beyond saving and you just say “good job”. Now scale this up to ever evolving, highly complex systems that have to work with five-nines regularity. When we don’t need the humans to workshop the fixes, things will be different.
vldszn 9mo ago
He is lowkey right
yesitcan 9mo ago
AOL still exists?

190 points by paulpauper 9mo ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aq0JSbuIppQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aq0JSbuIppQ

a16z talking again? This is your regular reminder that 1) a16z is one the largest backers of LLMs 2) They named one of the two authors of the Fascist Manifesto their patron saint 3) AI systems are built to function in ways that degrade and are likely to destroy our crucial civic institutions. (Quoted from Professor Woodrow Hartzog "How AI Destroys Institutions"). Or to put it another way, being plausible but slightly wrong and un-auditable—at scale—is the killer feature of LLMs and this combination of properties makes it an essentially fascist technology meaning it is well suited to centralizing authority, eliminating checks on that authority and advancing an anti-science agenda (quoted from the A plausible, scalable and slightly wrong black box: why large language models are a fascist technology that cannot be redeemed post).

arjie 9mo ago
I will not claim to be an expert historian but one general belief I have is that nomenclature undergoes semantic migration over a century. So for the sake of conciseness I will quote the first demand of each portion of the Fascist Manifesto. This isn't to obscure, because it is in Wikipedia[0] and translated in English on EN Wikipedia[1], but so I can share a sample of whether this is something we can relate to our present day political orientation. Hopefully it will inform what you believe "author of the Fascist Manifesto" to imply: > ... > For this WE WANT: > On the political problem: > Universal suffrage by regional list voting, with proportional representation, voting and eligibility for women. > ... > On the social problem: > WE WANT: > The prompt enactment of a state law enshrining the legal eight-hour workday for all jobs. > ... > On the military issue: > WE WANT: > The establishment of a national militia with brief educational services and exclusively defensive duty. > ... > On the financial problem: > WE WANT: > A strong extraordinary tax on capital of a progressive nature, having the form of true PARTIAL EXPROPRIATION of all wealth. > ... 0: https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programma_di_San_Sepolcro#Testo https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programma_di_San_Sepolcro#Test... 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascist_Manifesto#Text https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascist_Manifesto#Text
- holden_nelson 9mo ago
  I’m not particularly political and am also not a historian but I don’t think it’s necessarily correct to equate the literal text of the manifesto with the principles and practices of fascism. The message of universal suffrage vs. that of preventing an out group from “stealing” an election are not far apart semantically. Same with workers rights - in practice the worker protection laws that were passed in Italy at this time were so full of loopholes and qualifications that ultimately the workers do not gain power in that system. It is this fair, in my view, to question the spirit of the manifesto in the first place.
  - arjie 9mo ago
    I suppose we should, in being intellectually consistent, take the appropriate position that 8 hours / day and a wealth tax are fascist principles.
- decidu0us9034 9mo ago
  Sure. They're making a strong claim, but I think they mean "author of the Fascist Manifesto" as shorthand to say Marinetti was an ardent supporter of fascism and Mussolini. His support continued throughout the 30's and 40's, even after the Pact of Steel and the Racial Laws etc, even volunteering to go to the Eastern Front. I think we can say with the benefit of hindsight that the fascists' attempts to ingratiate themselves to the worker's movement were sort of ancilliary to the whole political/ideological project... I mean I'd hope any student of history agrees with that...
nylonstrung 9mo ago
This wasn't a16z monolithically speaking as a firm, it was Anish Acharya talking on a podcast. Seems like he's focused on fintech and not involved in many of their LLM investments

duzer65657 9mo ago

>> Anish Acharya says it is not worth it to use AI-assisted coding for all business functions. AI should focus on core business development, not rebuilding enterprise software. I don't even know what this means, but my take: we should stop listening to VCs (especially those like A16Z) who have an obvious vested interest that doesn't match the rest of society. Granting these people an audience is totally unwarranted; nobody but other tech bros said "we will vibe code everything" in the first place. Best case scenario: they all go to the same exclusive conference, get the branded conference technical vest and that's were the asteroid hits.

7777777phil 9mo ago

Even a16z is walking this back now. I wrote about why the “vibe code everything” thesis doesn’t hold up in two recent pieces: (1) https://philippdubach.com/posts/the-saaspocalypse-paradox/ https://philippdubach.com/posts/the-saaspocalypse-paradox/ (2) https://philippdubach.com/posts/the-impossible-backhand/ https://philippdubach.com/posts/the-impossible-backhand/ Acharya’s framing is different from mine (he’s talking book on software stocks) but the conclusion is the same: the “innovation bazooka” pointed at rebuilding payroll is a bad allocation of resources. Benedict Evans called me out on LinkedIn for this (https://philippdubach.com/posts/is-ai-really-eating-the-world-1/2/ https://philippdubach.com/posts/is-ai-really-eating-the-worl...) take, which I take as a sign the argument is landing..

selridge 9mo ago
> Benedict Evans called me out on LinkedIn for this take, which I take as a sign the argument is landing. Excellent. And correct lol.
- crsv 9mo ago
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mrwh 9mo ago
> investors are simultaneously punishing hyperscaler stocks because AI capex might generate weak returns, while destroying software stocks because AI adoption will be so pervasive it renders all existing software obsolete. Both cannot hold simultaneously. I don't understand this point. Can't it be possible that the ultimate effect is to devalue, hugely, software? As in it can totally both be true that AI capex has weak returns and at the same time most SaaS companies go bankrupt. To take an analogy: if ever we manage to successfully mine asteroids, and find some vast quantity of platinum, it could both be true that every existing platinum miner loses their shirt, and also that the value of platinum sinks so far that the asteroid mining company cannot cover its costs.
- re-thc 9mo ago
  SaaS companies were just overvalued. They had crazy multiples. Not even an AI thing.

alephnerd 9mo ago

Both AI Fanatics and AI Luddites need to touch grass. We work in Software ENGINEERING. Engineering is all about what tools makes sense to solve a specific problem. In some cases, AI tools do show immediate business value (eg. TTS for SDR) and in other cases this is less obvious. This is all the more reason why learning about AI/ML fundamentals is critical in the same way understanding computer architecture, systems programming, algorithms, and design principles are critical to being a SWE, because then you can make a data-driven judgment on whether an approach works or not. Given the number of throwaway accounts that commented, it clearly struck a nerve.

rsrsrs86 9mo ago
The irony is, AI coding only works after and if you put a lot of work on engineering, like creating a factory.
- alephnerd 9mo ago
  There is a lot of work that goes on before even reaching the point to write code. For example, being able to vibecode a UI wireframe instead of being blocked for 2 sprints by your UI/UX team or templating an alpha to gauge customer interest in 1 week instead of 1 quarter is a massive operational improvement. Of course these aren't completed products, but customers in most cases can accept such performance in the short-to-medium term or if it is part of an alpha. This is why I keep repeating ad nauseum that most decisionmakers don't expect AI to replace jobs. The reality is, professional software engineering is about translating business requirements into tangible products. It's not the codebase that matters in most cases - it's the requirements and outcomes that do. Like you can refactor and prettify your codebase all you want, but if it isn't directly driving customer revenue or value, then that time could be better spent elsewhere. It's the usecase that your product enables which is why they are purchasing your product.
  - rsrsrs86 9mo ago
    As a researcher in formal methods, I totally get you

atomic128 9mo ago

Sounds like a16z has some rapidly depreciating software equity they want to sell you. Or maybe they own the debt. Listen to some of the Marc Andreessen interviews promoting cryptocurrency in 2021. Do that and you will never listen to him or his associates again.

rsrsrs86 9mo ago
They don’t make money by being right, they make money by exposing LPs to risk. Zero commitment to insight. Intellectual production goes only so far as to attract funding.
- bigbuppo 9mo ago
  Also... they don't make money by promoting things that are good ideas that make sense. That's why every lucky billionaire tech bro that gets into VC ultimately invests in smart toilets. Ultimately, they just keep putting money into each slot machine they can find until one of them pays out a jackpot. Eventually one of them will make up for all the other losses.

tombert 9mo ago

I dunno. I really hate the expression "the new normal", because it sort of smuggles in the assumption that there exists such thing as "normal". It always felt like one of those truisms that people say to exploit emotions like "in these trying times" or "no one wants to work anymore". But I really do think that vibe coding is the "new normal". These tools are already extremely useful, to a point where I don't really think we'll be able to go back. These tools are getting good enough that it's getting to a point where you have to use them. This might sound like I'm supportive of this, and I guess am to some extent, but I find it to be exceedingly disappointing because writing software isn't fun anymore. One of my most upvoted comments on HN talks about how I don't enjoy programming, but instead I enjoy problem solving. This was written before I was aware of vibe coding stuff, and I think I was wrong. I guess I actually did enjoy the process of writing the code, instead of just delegating my work to a virtual intern while I just watch the AI do the fun stuff. A very small part of me is kind of hoping that once AI has to be priced at "not losing money on every call" levels that I'll be forced to actually think about this stuff again.

syndacks 9mo ago
I largely agree with you. And, given your points about “not going back” — how do you propose interviewing SWEs?
- tombert 9mo ago
  I have thought about this a lot, and I have no idea. I work for an "AI-first" company, and we're kind of required to use AI stuff as often as we can, so I make very liberal use of Codex, but I've been shielded from the interview process thus far. I think I would still kind of ask the same questions, though maybe a bit more conceptual. Like, for example, I might see if I could get someone to explain how to build something, and then ask them about data structures that might be useful (e.g. removing a lock by making an append-only structure). I find that Codex will generally generate something that "works" but without an understanding data structures and algorithms, its implementation will still be somewhat sub-optimal, meaning that understanding the fundamentals has value, at least for now.

j45 9mo ago

Just because we can code something faster or cheaper doesn't increase the odds it will be right.

falcor84 9mo ago
Arguably it does, because being able to experience something gives you much more insight into whether it's right or not - so being able to iterate quickly many times, continuously updating your spec and definition of done should help you get to the right solution. To be clear, there is still effort involved, but the effort becomes more about the critical evaluation rather than the how.
- packetlost 9mo ago
  But that's not the only problem. To illustrate, I'll share what I'm working on now. My companies ops guy vibe coded a bunch of scripts to manage deployments. On the surface, they appear to do the correct thing. Except they don't. The tag for the Docker image used is hardcoded in a yaml file and doesn't get updated anywhere unless you do it manually. The docs don't even mention half of the necessary scripts/commands or implicit setup necessary for any of it to work in the first place, much less the tags or how any of it actually works. There are two completely different deployment strategies (direct to VM with docker + GCP and a GKE-based K8s deploy). Neither fully work, and only one has any documentation at all (and that documentation is completely vibed, so has very low information density). The only reason I'm able to use this pile of garbage at all is because I already know how all of the independent pieces function and can piece it together, but that's after wasting several hours of "why the fuck aren't my changes having an effect." There are very, very few lines of code that don't matter in well architected systems, but many that don't in vibed systems. We already have huge problems with overcomplicated crap made exclusively by humans, that's been hard enough to manage. Vibe coding consistently gives the illusion of progress by fixing an immediate problem at the expense of piling on crap that obscures what's actually going on and often breaks exiting functionality. It's frankly not sustainable. That being said, I've gotten some utility out of vibe coding tools, but it mostly just saves me some mental effort of writing boring shit that isn't interesting, innovative, or enjoyable, which is like 20% of mental effort and 5% of my actual work. I'm not even going to get started on the context switching costs. It makes my ADHD feel happy but I'm confident I'm less productive because of the secondary effects.

godelski 9mo ago

Let's just look at Dijkstra's On the Foolishness of "Natural Language Programming". It really does a good job at explaining why natural language programming (and thus, Vibe Coding) is a dead end. It serves as a good reminder that we developed the languages of Math and Programming for a reason. The pedantic nature is a feature, not a flaw. It is because in programming (and math) we are dealing with high levels of abstraction constantly and thus ambiguity compounds. Isn't this something we learn early on as programmers? That a computer does exactly what you tell it to, not what you intend to tell it to? Think about how that phrase extends when we incorporate LLM Coding Agents. | The virtue of formal texts is that their manipulations, in order to be legitimate, need to satisfy only a few simple rules; they are, when you come to think of it, an amazingly effective tool for ruling out all sorts of nonsense that, when we use our native tongues, are almost impossible to avoid. - Dijkstra All of you have experienced the ambiguity and annoyances of natural language. Have you ever: - Had a boss give you confusing instructions? - Argued with someone only to find you agree? - Talked with someone and one of you doesn't actually understand the other? - Talked with someone and the other person seems batshit insane but they also seem to have avoided a mental asylum? - Use different words to describe the same thing? - When standing next to someone and looking at the same thing? - Adapted your message so you "talk to your audience"? - Ever read/wrote something on the internet? (where "everyone" is the audience) Congrats, you have experienced the frustrations and limitations of natural language. Natural language is incredibly powerful and the ambiguity is a feature and a flaw, just like how in formal languages the precision is both a feature and a flaw. I mean it can take an incredible amount of work to say even very simple and obvious things with formal languages[1], but the ambiguity disappears[2]. Vibe Coding has its uses and I'm sure that'll expand, but the idea of it replacing domain experts is outright laughable. You can't get it to resolve ambiguity if you aren't aware of the ambiguity. If you've ever argued with the LLM take a step back and ask yourself, is there ambiguity? It'll help you resolve the problem and make you recognize the limits. I mean just look at the legal system, that is probably one of the most serious efforts to create formalization in natural language and we still need lawyers and judges to sit around and argue all day about all the ambiguity that remains. I seriously can't comprehend how on a site who's primary users are programmers this is an argument. If we somehow missed this in our education (formal or self) then how do we not intuit it from our everyday interactions? [0] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667.html https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principia_Mathematica https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principia_Mathematica [2] Most programming languages are some hybrid variant. e.g. Python uses duck typing: if it looks like a float, operates like a float, and works as a float, then it is probably a float. Or another example even is C, what used to be called a "high level programming language" (so is Python a celestial language?). Give up some precision/lack of ambiguity for ease.

benreesman 9mo ago

Vibecoding is a net wealth transfer from frightened people to unscrupulous people. Machine assisted rigorous software engineering is an even bigger wealth transfer from unscrupulous people to passionate computer scientists.

rsrsrs86 9mo ago
Sadly, this is the most serious comment here. People who are not shocked are people who haven’t seen what a highly educated computer scientist can do in single player mode.
- benreesman 9mo ago
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theturtletalks 9mo ago

All these articles seem to think people will vibe code by prompting: make me my own Stripe make me my own Salesforce make me my own Shopify It will be more like: Look at how Lago, an open-source Stripe layer, works and make it work with Authorized.net directly Look at Twenty, an open-source CRM, and make it work in our tech stack for our sales needs Look at how Medusa, an open-source e-commerce platform, works and what features we would need and bring into our website When doing the latter, getting a good enough alternative will reduce the need for commercial SaaS. On top of that, these commercial SaaS are bloated with features in their attempt to work with as many use cases as possible and configuring them is “coding” by another name. Throw in Enshittification and the above seems to the next logical move by companies looking to move off these apps.

whatever1 9mo ago
So maybe the saas will pivot to just sell some barebone agents that include their real IP? The rest (UI, dashboards and connectivity) will be tailored made by LLMs
selridge 9mo ago
The right move is this, turned to 11. Velocity or one-shot capability isn't the move. It's making stuff that used to be traumatic just...normal now. Google fucking vibe-coded their x86 -> ARM ISA changeover. It never would have been done without agents. Not like "google did it X% faster." Google would have let that sit forever because the labor economics of the problem were backwards. That doesn't MATTER anymore. If you have some scratch, some halfway decent engineers, and a clear idea, you can build stuff that was just infeasible or impossible. all it takes is time and care. Some people have figured this out and are moving now.
- theturtletalks 9mo ago
  Exactly, if the engineers know where to look for the solution in open-source code and point the AI there, it will get them there. Even if the language or the tech stack are different, AI is excellent at finding the seams, those spots where a feature connects to the underlying tech stack, and figuring out how the feature is really implemented, and bringing that over.

manoDev 9mo ago

People are overestimating the value on having AI create something given loose instructions, and underestimating the value of using AI as a tool for a human to learn and explore a problem space. The bias shows on the terminology (“agents”). We finally made the computer able to speak “our” language - but we still see computers as just automation. There’s a lot of untapped potential in the other direction, in encoding and compressing knowledge IMO.

georgeecollins 9mo ago
Right! It's like maybe the AI is more of a threat to the accounts payable person than the accounts payable software. At least in terms of head count.
fsddd 9mo ago
Problem space is rich. The thing doesnt actually know what a problem is. The thing is incredibly good at searching through large spaces of information.
- consumer451 9mo ago
  42
  - fsddd 9mo ago
    Not sure what you mean by that lol
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rsrsrs86 9mo ago

I hear and read so much shit by VCs. Both in LinkedIn and in private meetings. Specially Menlo says a lot of shit (check LinkedIn). Deloitte and McKinsey, also full of crap. Really. Vcs are choke full of companies that can be cloned over night, SaaS companies that will face ridiculously fast substitution, and a whoooole lotta capital deployed on lousy RAGs and OpenAI Wrappers.

bigbuppo 9mo ago
The bullshit people love the bullshit generators.

NinjaTrance 9mo ago

The possibility that anyone can easily replicate any startup scares A16Z.

toomuchtodo 9mo ago
This is what always confused me about VC AI enthusiasm. Their moat is the capital. As AI improves, it destroys their moat. And yet, they are stoked to invest in it, the architects of their own demise.
- ironhaven 9mo ago
  Don't you have that backwards? If AI gets so good that it can replace all human labor, will capital like money and data centers be the only moat left?
  - georgemcbay 9mo ago
    > If AI gets so good that it can replace all human labor, will capital like money and data centers be the only moat left? If AI gets good enough to replace all human labor then actual physical moats to keep the hungry, rioting replaced humans away will be the most important moats.
    - satvikpendem 9mo ago
      Which is bought by money in the first place, see billionaire doomsday bunkers. The poor will not have such a bunker.
      - acuozzo 9mo ago
        Unless they intend on generating their own oxygen to breathe, I don't see how these bunkers stand a chance.
        satvikpendem 9mo ago

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upmind 9mo ago

A16Zs opinion is worthless to me, they know very little about the market. Furthermore, they're notorious for having a lot of "partners".

mountainriver 9mo ago
Their whole game is just pump and dump
SilverElfin 9mo ago
Has everyone forgotten about when they pumped absurd crypto scams like NFTs
neom 9mo ago
Depends on the partner, Peter Levine is a pretty damn good picker (supported us series A to IPO). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_J._Levine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_J._Levine
thenaturalist 9mo ago
Pretty worthless take posting an ad-hominem attack instead of addressing the actual content of the article/ statement.

newzino 9mo ago

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dnautics 9mo ago

you cant easily vibecode everything. in my startup this is what I am not buying (and vibecoding): - JIRA/trello/monday.com - benchling - obsidian this is what i buy and have no intent to replace: - carta - docusign - gusto/rippling - bank this is what might be on the chopping block: - gsuite

rogerrogerr 9mo ago
Why not Docusign? Not challenging, just curious why that is specifically on your list. Reputation?
- dnautics 9mo ago
  the common factor was sort of left as an exercise to the reader to think about moats in the age of AI... but basically anything that has touchpoints to the legal and financial systems im not gonna touch with a 20 ft vibecoded pole.
- Ekaros 9mo ago
  Sometimes value is not in the code or the product. But the fact that leg work is done and something is generally accepted for the purpose. For me it looks like type of product where the pain is not making the software. It is getting everyone you will deal with to agree that software is acceptable.
levkk 9mo ago
I'm curious about your reasoning. Jira/Trello etc. are like $10/mo/seat, why bother rewriting them from scratch? You'll spend more in tokens doing so. Same for gmail/google calendar, what's the ROI? Those tools are reliable and cheap, why bother creating your own?
- dnautics 9mo ago
  jira/trello: ergonomics. to set them up correctly exactly the way i want would take me 20 hours (or hire a PM), i can vibecode for 20h and get the same result. plus, being able to crossref internal data types is chef's kiss. im paying for claude pro so it's use it or lose it. when i finish everything and have it battle tested i can end my claude code. and anyways when i have 10 employees, it's parity. for gsuite: i want to own everything internally eventually ans having internal xrefs will be nice. the gsuite data is incidental, what is truly valuable about gsuite is spam detection and the oauth capability

Rastonbury 9mo ago

Anyone who's seen an enterprise deal close or dealt with enterprise customer requests will know this, the build vs buy calculus has always been there yet companies still buy. Until you can get AI to the point where it equivalent to a 20 person engineering team, people are not going to build their own Snowflake, Salesforce, Slack or ATS. Maybe that day is 3 years away but when that happens the world will be very different

designerarvid 9mo ago
Companies do make/buy decisions on everything, it just software. Cleaning services are not expensive, yet companies contract them instead of hiring staff. This is called transaction cost economics, if anyone’s interested.
bensyverson 9mo ago
I agree generally, but some of these enterprise contracts are eye-watering. If the choice is $2M/year with a 3-year minimum contract, or rolling your own, I think calculus really has shifted. With that said, the entire business world does not understand that software is more than just code. Even if you could write code instantly, making enterprise software would still take time, because there are simply so many high-stakes decisions to make, and so much fractal detail.
- nicoburns 9mo ago
  > If the choice is $2M/year with a 3-year minimum contract, or rolling your own, I think calculus really has shifted. But why? It was always dramatically cheaper for enterprises to build rather than buy. They stopped doing that becuase they did that in the 90s and ended up with legacy codebases that they didn't know how to maintain. I can't see AI helping with that.
  - etothepii 9mo ago
    This might be the biggest benefit of AI coding. If I have a large legacy code base I can use AI to ask questions and find out where certain things are happening. This benefit is huge even if I choose not to vibe code anything. It ends up feeling a lot like the engineer that wrote the code is still with you or documented everything very well. In the real world there is a risk that documentation is wrong or that the engineer misremembers some detail so even the occasional hallucination is not a particularly big risk.

random3 9mo ago

AI is eating the software https://a16z.com/why-software-is-eating-the-world/ https://a16z.com/why-software-is-eating-the-world/

bhewes 9mo ago

Why is it bad for AI to replace an enterprise software layer? Other than invalidating past investments.

captainbland 9mo ago
A few reasons, "AI" as used by non-experts often has correctness and security issues. Even when it doesn't, its outputs are often not reproducible/predictable because they're probabilistic systems. AI systems are also prone to writing code which they can't effectively refactor themselves, implying that many of these code bases are fiscal time bombs where human experts are required to come fix them. If the service being replaced has transactional behaviour, does the AI produced solution? Does the person using it know what that means? The other side is that AI as an industry still needs to recoup trillions in investment, and enterprise users are potential whales for that. Good prices in AI systems today are not guaranteed to last because even with hardware improvements these systems need to make money back that has been invested in them.
- tehjoker 9mo ago
  Some of that latter part depends on how good and cheap open weight systems get. The ability to deploy your own will strictly limit the price of closed models if they aren't dominant in functionality.

ManuelKiessling 9mo ago

There was a short moment in history where it seemed that the sentiment was: people will soon 3D-print 99% of their household items themselves instead of buying them. You absolutely could print things like cups, soap holders, picture frames, the small shovel you use for gardening, and so on an so on. 99% of people still just buy this stuff.

throwaway314155 9mo ago
That has more to do with the shortcomings of 3d printing.
- klardotsh 9mo ago
  I think some or maybe even many of those shortcomings will apply to software, too. Making actual good software is not as trivial as writing “make me an app”, much as making an actual good spoon is not as trivial as throwing an STL at a printer and calling it a day.
- alfiedotwtf 9mo ago
  Are you saying vibed code doesn’t have shortcomings

thomasjudge 9mo ago

"aol.com"?

obiefernandez 9mo ago

I just recreated most of Linear for my company in a few days. Making it hyper specific to what we want (metrics driven, lean startup style). All state changes are made with MCP so it saved me from having to spend time on any forms and most interactions other than filtering searching sorting etc. Means we will be ditching Linear soon. I know I’m an outlier but this sort of thing will get more common.

satvikpendem 9mo ago
I don't understand this because who's gonna maintain it in the future? Surely that costs more to pay even one person to add features that Linear had than to pay Linear themselves. I'd do this for personal projects but never for my work company lest I be the one to maintain it indefinitely on top of my current work.
- pizzly 9mo ago
  one thing annoying with premade solutions is that it only does 90% of what you want, its livable but still doesn't quite meet your needs. Its not just adding features that Linear already provides but adding features and integrations that mets 100% your needs. The full decision making equation is (cost of implementing it yourself + cost of maintenance + 10% additional benefit for a solution that fully meets your needs) versus (cost of preexisting solution that meets 90% of your needs). Cost of implementing it and cost of maintenance has just gone down. Surely that will mean on a whole more people as a whole will choose to make inhouse rather than outsource. Thus demand for premade solutions will go down, Saas providers won't be able to increase their prices as this will make even more people choose to implement it themselves. The cost of producing software will continue to drop due to agentic coding and maintenance cost will drop as well due to maintenance coding agents. More people will choose their own custom solutions and so on. Its very possible we are in the beginning of the end for Saas companies.
  - satvikpendem 9mo ago
    I think even with vibe coding people definitely still underestimate the stuff mentioned in this comment about IaaS: > server operations, storage, scalability, backups, security, compliance, etc https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47097450 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47097450

boznz 9mo ago

Never say never, vibe coding is not even 4 years old.

kristianp 9mo ago

> He said that software accounts for 8% to 12% of a company's expenses, so using vibe coding to build the company's resource planning or payroll tools would only save about 10%. Relying on AI to write code also carries risks, he said. > "You have this innovation bazooka with these models. Why would you point it at rebuilding payroll or ERP or CRM," Acharya said > Instead, companies are better off using AI to develop their core businesses or optimize the remaining 90% of their costs

dabinat 9mo ago

The bottleneck will always be humans. You could get AI to write a million lines of code a day, but you’d still need humans to review and test that code. We are a very long way from being able to blindly trust AI’s outputs in production.

mephitix 9mo ago
IMO I would have agreed with this statement 2 months ago but now it’s clear AI is already much better at reviewing and even testing code (via spinning up simulators, etc) much better than we can. We’re already using AI’s outputs in production and not writing much code these days.
- andrekandre 9mo ago
  > AI is already much better at reviewing and even testing for code in isolation, perhaps, but how does it know what is correct for what the customer wants/needs?
  - acuozzo 9mo ago
    > how does it know what is correct for what the customer wants/needs? The way NASA does it so that they can trust deliverables from the lowest bidder. That is, have developers translate the wants/needs into detailed contracts of work.
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cal_dent 9mo ago
I don’t even think it’s about reviewing and testing. The bottleneck will always be humans. We don’t like to always admit it but most jobs are fairly straightforward, as in the actual day to day tasks. Yes being smart is great and useful etc. but after a certain point it’s diminishing returns on the actual tasks you have to do. Dealing with other humans and their egos and eccentricities and the multitude ways each person sees the world is always what makes all jobs tricky. I suspect this whole ai wave/hype/reality is going to open many people’s eyes to this. We will laugh that we use to call them “soft” skills.

bitwize 9mo ago

Well, yeah. Vibe coding as in letting AI one-shot an app with a vague description still doesn't work except on trivial, throwaway stuff. But... spec-driven development with automated stepwise refinement by agents recursively generating, testing, and improving the code is how software engineering is done in the late 2020s.

klardotsh 9mo ago
You write that in italics as if to imply it’s a law that cannot be questioned. Quite a number of shops do not engineer software like that, or only engineer software like that where it fits the environment the software lives in, or otherwise sit at numerous points along the gradient between “software engineering as it has been known for decades” and “fully computer generated software”.
- bitwize 9mo ago
  The laws of scale are stone cold bitches, and so you really don't need a weatherman to tell which way the wind is blowing. By 2030 writing code by hand in an IDE will almost certainly be a curiosity for retro enthusiasts, like programming a C64 in BASIC is now. The field as a profession will be unrecognizable and, as things become more automated and even self-improving, have far fewer people working in it, by 2030.

alun 9mo ago

> "You have this innovation bazooka with these models. Why would you point it at rebuilding payroll or ERP or CRM" Most SaaS companies are just expensive wrappers on top of existing tools. For non-VC-funded companies, SaaS tools are a serious cost. If you can re-create them in-house with AI, why wouldn't you? The result is saving capital (which you can then employ to do the more innovative things), and being in control over your own data.

nofriend 9mo ago
If this is actually viable, then SaaS will (be forced to) lower costs until it is no longer worthwhile.
- alun 9mo ago
  Yup, it becomes a race to the bottom. And honestly that's a good thing, everyone hates paying for all of these subscriptions.

anonzzzies 9mo ago

> "You have this innovation bazooka with these models. Why would you point it at rebuilding payroll or ERP or CRM" They invested in ERP/CRM? I built one (fairly complete to the German/Italy/EU tax system) and it saves a ton of money vs commercial offerings. So yeah, of course we will.

AbstractH24 9mo ago

I once built a CRM in Google Sheets fully mirroring the data model of Salesforce. For contact, company, deal, and call tracking for a one sales rep business. (Before XLookup was in Google Sheets) Did it work? Yes. Was it worth my time to maintain and scale the “platform” with the company rather than outsource all that to a CRM company? Not at all. Time is finite. Spend your time doing what you do best, pay others to do what they do best.

WheelsAtLarge 9mo ago
Yup, my experience has been that vibe-coding is very time-consuming. It reminds me very much of how LLMs are great at creating mind-blowing images, but you get what you get. Once you decide that you need to modify the image you get, it becomes a time sink. You might be able to change it and get what you need, but there is no guarantee and it's a never ending task. The same thing happens with code; you may get great results from your prompt, but trying to customize it will drive you nuts and you may never get what you want. Maintenance is another hurdle. How do you maintain code you might not have the skills to maintain? Vibe-coding may reduce software creation time, but it's not taking over software engineering. The SaaS business is going nowhere. Most people, by far, will continue to rely on someone else for their software needs. But be very aware that the software business will change. We are seeing that already.
stingrae 9mo ago
It doesn't make sense for every company to make their own Salesforce clone. The key is that it makes new companies entering the market to compete with Salesforce immensely easier. More competition will just force lower overall margins in SAAS.
- hippo22 9mo ago
  It's not really that hard to make a Salesforce clone now though. Writing the software was never the hard part of building a business.
  - ncallaway 9mo ago

zhubert 9mo ago

I can’t believe I’m responding to an AOL article, but… You don’t understand what’s happening if you dismiss the leverage provided by AI as “vibe coding”.

aobdev 9mo ago

Thought exercise for those in disagreement: why would every company use AI to build their own payroll/ERP/CRM, when just a handful of companies could use AI to build those offerings better? This is largely how things work now; AI may lower the cost and increase margins, but the economics of build vs buy seem the same.

Fire-Dragon-DoL 9mo ago
Well the answer is because the cost of that software is lower than somebody building the other software. What happens is that all these SaaS drop in value because it is now realistic to build them internally
- aobdev 9mo ago
  Why does AI make it cheaper to build internal but not cheaper for SaaS competitors to pop up? Everyone has access to the same tools.
  - copperx 9mo ago
    It does make it cheaper, obviously. But the barrier to entry is almost zero, like panhandling. That's why it can't substitute a job.
  - Fire-Dragon-DoL 9mo ago
    Oh sure! My conclusion is that they will drop in value, not disappear. Basically I expect way smaller companies popping up competing with the big ones and their offering will be priced way lower because their payroll is way smaller. While there is no competitor, internal tools will pop up now.
    - aobdev 9mo ago
      I believe that. Companies will build cheap tools today while competitors are spinning up to undercut ADP, Salesforce, and SAP. But what happens tomorrow? There are plenty of examples in IT today where the reasonable option is to outsource in 90% of cases: don’t roll your own auth, don’t host your own email server, don’t build your own data center. I don’t see how AI can change that, when the people who build specialized software also have access to AI. Another great example is open source. I think PostgreSQL being free and usable by everyone is a more economic outcome than every Fortune 500 company building their own database engine. Payroll, ERP, and CRM fall into the same category of being commodity software in a lot of cases.

martinald 9mo ago

I sort of agree with this, but what a lot of people are missing is it's unbelievably easy to clone a lot of SaaS products. So I think big SaaS products are under attack from three angles now: 1) People replacing certain systems with 'vibe coded' ones, for either cost/feature/unhappiness with vendor reasons. I actually think this is a bigger threat than people think - there are so many BAD SaaS products out there which cost businesses a fortune in poor features/bugs/performance/uptime, and if the models/agents keep improving the way they have in the last couple of years it's going to be very interesting if some sort of '1000x' engineer in an agent can do crazy impressive stuff. 2) Agents 'replacing' the software. As people have pointed out, just have the agent use APIs to do whatever workflow you want - ping a database and output a report. 3) "Cheap" clones of existing products. A tiny team can now clone a "big" SaaS product very quickly. These guys can provide support/infra/migration assistance and make money at a much lower price point. Even if there is lock in, it makes it harder for SaaS companies to keep price pressure up.

sebastos 9mo ago
Insightful points! It would be interesting if, with all the anxiety about vibe coding becoming the new normal, its only lasting effect is the emergence of smaller B2B companies that quickly razzle dazzle together a bespoke replacement for Concur, SAP, Workday, the crappy company sharepoint - whatever. Reminds me of what people say Palantir is doing, but now supercharged by the AI-driven workflows to stand up the “forward deployed” “solution” even faster.
- martinald 9mo ago
  Thanks,yes exactly what I think. Or an industry specific Workday, with all of workdays features but aimed at a niche vertical. I wrote about this (including an approach on how to clone apps with HAR files and agents) if you are interested. https://martinalderson.com/posts/attack-of-the-clones/ https://martinalderson.com/posts/attack-of-the-clones/
harrall 9mo ago
But have you ever tried to clone a product or tool for yourself before? At first it’s great because you think that you saved money but then you start having to maintain it… fixing problems, filling in gaps… you now realize that you made a mistake. Just because AI can do it now doesn’t mean you aren’t just now having to use AI to do the same thing… Also, agents are not deterministic. If you use it to analyze data, it will get it right most of the time but, once in a blue moon, it will make shit up, except you can’t tell which time it was. You could make it deterministic by having AI write a tool instead… except you now have the first problem of maintaining a tool. That isn’t to say that there isn’t small low hanging fruit that AI will replace, but it’s a bit different when you need a real product with support. At the end of the day, you hire a plumber or use a SaaS not because you can’t do it yourself, but because you don’t want to do it and rather want someone else who is committed to it to handle it.

seg_lol 9mo ago

I cannot believe there has been no mention of things like n8n, activepieces and windmill in this thread. SaaS will utterly collapse in 18 months. https://github.com/n8n-io/n8n https://github.com/n8n-io/n8n https://github.com/activepieces/activepieces https://github.com/activepieces/activepieces https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill

umairnadeem123 9mo ago

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atlgator 9mo ago

"You have this innovation bazooka. Why would you point it at rebuilding payroll?" — a partner at the firm whose thesis was literally "software is eating the world." Apparently the meal is over and now we're just rearranging the plates.

plaidfuji 9mo ago
My first thought as well - they suddenly realized they have an interest in AI not cannibalizing their existing SaaS portfolio

zmmmmm 9mo ago

It seems to be premised on the idea we would vibe code a replica of what we get from SaaS. But the real point is, we would not do that. We would vibe code something that exactly fits our business. We have products we're paying $100k a year for and using 3% of the functionality. And they suck. This is the target.

ozgrakkurt 9mo ago

..said the guy, who doesn’t code anyway

jazzpush2 9mo ago

A16z partners don't know shit. Brain dead nepo-babies - how's Cluely?

ookblah 9mo ago

a lot of low level ops stuff is going to be eaten up imo. half the bullshit you have to deal with is integrating data across every platform you are using or other supposed products to help you integrate the integrators lol. i guess if you're a huge company with 1000s of people this is an inherent problem anyway, one you can spend millions of dollars on. it's not just "replace snowflake", there are a lot of times i wish i could build a very focused thing to accelerate some of our internal workflows and the nocode solutions either were too simplistic that you ended up spending just as much time trying to wrangle some generic solution to your own use case. OR it was not worth throwing significant engineering resources behind internal ops stuff. now that barrier is dropping fast and it's feasible for us. whoever can create the framework/tooling for people build their own systems will win this, but i don't think it's something that can be "productized" like a saas.

ChicagoDave 9mo ago

The buy vs build discussion has dramatically changed with GenAI. Some enterprise systems need to remain vendor based, but there’s a ton of space for mid-size and smaller companies to build and maintain their own systems and tons of software that were excel apps could be fully realized departmental systems.

onion2k 9mo ago
That's a short term view. Any system you build inhouse has to be maintained until you replace it, and often the longer it remains in place the harder it is to do that. You might save a small amount of cash (which might be important at the time tbf) but you're creating a major headache for later. Legacy code is debt, and that includes all your code. It's also a huge problem if the maintainer leaves because typically those small systems are owned by an individual dev who set it up in the first place. Everyone who founds a company needs to remember that they're building a system of systems that all interact and influence each other, and you have to balance short term cash flow against long term strategy.
- PacificSpecific 9mo ago
  I don't understand why you appear to be downvoted for this (your comment is faded at the time I'm reading this). It sounds like a perfectly reasonable take. I've certainly inherited and also caused these problems in my younger years.
- aleph_minus_one 9mo ago
  > It's also a huge problem if the maintainer leaves because typically those small systems are owned by an individual dev who set it up in the first place. It's not uncommon that this maintainer actually wants to get away from maintaining this code, and would actually be quite willing to teach some successor how everything works. The problem is that it is often hard to find someone who is similarly passionate about this system (often the system only keeps working because the original maintainer invests a lot of energy into keeping it alive), and is thus brutally willing to learn this system inside out. You can't force this mentality from above: either a suitable programmer has this mentality or he is typically not suitable.

saidnooneever 9mo ago

its the same as why roads are still built by hand a lot and houses etc.. it is not needed to automate everything. some joys should not be automated away, people wont let them be either way. the world could be much more optimal in .any place, but its boring, so the optimisations go elsewhere.

didntknowyou 9mo ago

so are they saying this based on their analysis, or because they are trying to stir up support for a non-vibe-coding startup they have have invested.

koliber 9mo ago

Using vibe coding to build a small specialized tool for a small company that can be used instead of single feature of a commercial SaaS is doable and brings value. Using vibe coding to build something to replace an enterprise SaaS offering for a medium to large company is not something to be taken lightly. The tool and the code is not everything. The operating environment, security guarantees, SLAs, support, and a bag of features you don't need today but might tomorrow is what the SaaS offerings bring to the table. Imagine that I run a really good software house. I can literally build anything you want, feature wise, better than most. I do it quickly. You come to me and say you want to replace Slack for your team of 200, because Slack got too expensive. I say I can do it. Because I am feeling generous and you're my good friend, I will do it for free. However, I will just give you the code, a CI/CD script, and a README.md file. I will disappear and will not maintain or support your software, nor will I give you any guarantees on how well it will work, other than a "trust me." I wouldn't take the offer.

zozbot234 9mo ago
The Matrix folks have covered the "replace Slack internal chat" case already. They will give you the code so that you can bring the service up internally, or you can use any 3rd party hosted solution that provides the usual support and "enterprise" guarantees, for a price. Why can't this model generalize to sector-specific SaaS offerings that can now be prototyped cheaply via AI vibecoding?
- cowpig 9mo ago
  Zulip is an actual slack upgrade
  - notpushkin 9mo ago
    Or Mattermost, or Rocket.Chat, or... there’s tons of alternatives now. That’s not the point.
- kelnos 9mo ago
  As much as the Slack UX has somewhat enshittified at this point, the UX of Matrix is still so so so far behind Slack that it's often not even worth considering. I hear Zulip could actually be a real alternative, though I have no experience with it.

MantraHQ 9mo ago

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MantraHQ 9mo ago

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MantraHQ 9mo ago

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kwar13 9mo ago

aol.com...? wow what year is this

rhubarbtree 9mo ago

AI assisted coding is going to make it easier to create software. Developers will be more productive. Non developers will be able to create some stuff. What this means is that very simple apps will become easy to create quickly. So a todo manager is probably not going to be a very successful business. You’ll be competing with many many people and it will be commoditised. But ultimately what happens here is the “complexity threshold” of a sufficiently complex product needed to make money will be raised. Existing products will become more sophisticated or, if there is not more “sophistication ladder to climb” then they will be commoditised. There’s just no way people are going to vibe all their software, that’s a very self absorbed nerd take. But on the supply side we’ll see commoditisation, price drops, and increasingly good value for the user as features are shipped faster. I also think that software quality is really going to tank, because using validation to test the output of Claude is not a good way to ensure quality or correctness. It’ll get you some of the way but you need powerful reasoning. The most obvious evidence for this is security flaws in AI code. We’ll see a new era of enshitification caused by AI code. Like outsourced manufacturing though, people will buy worse stuff at a cheaper price. That makes me sad, because I thought we were on a path to better software, not buggier software.

lpeancovschi 9mo ago

One who thinks that complex software can be "vibe coded", hasn't worked on complex codebases.

funkyfiddler369 9mo ago
it can but it will take one person just as long as a small team without "AI" and that one person will carry all the frustration, doubt, all the to do lists and imaginary pin boards and all that other stuff programmers carry around in their heads, at work and back home. have fun with all that. side note: indie games are not complex software. and most "overvalued" and "impossible" and "walking it back now" comments are true in as many cases as they are not true and I really do not understand these commenters. smart people should not fall into the same category as people who think that "nobody cares" because they never met devoted lawyers, investigative journalists and law enforcers passionate about justice AND law. it's all so weird, man ...
aleph_minus_one 9mo ago
> One who thinks that complex software can be "vibe coded", hasn't worked on complex codebases. I do think that I have worked on somewhat complex code bases. The reason why they are complicated is often "political" (e.g. at some point it was decided that this is the way to go, and from then on the specific abstraction was used. It turned out these wishes were not a good idea, but the code was never re-developed with a "more proper" architecture (also for the reason that removing some insanely convoluted feature would anger some users)). I see no reason why some (hypothetical) AI couldn't come up with a much better architecture (also good programmers are capable of this). The problem is rather "getting this architecture through politically"; for some reason "AI suggested/created it" is much more socially accepted by managers than "programmer X considers this change to be necessary" (I cannot understand why).

ars-machina 9mo ago

Using non-deterministic LLMs to vibe code applications is a “workshop” activity - meaning it is iterative and the greater the complexity, the more complex it is to workshop the fixes. At some stage you realize that while you’re blown away by how sophisticated the LLM is, playing go-fish with it is a larger time suck than you expected. It’s like being asked to read a friend’s term paper only to find it’s beyond saving and you just say “good job”. Now scale this up to ever evolving, highly complex systems that have to work with five-nines regularity. When we don’t need the humans to workshop the fixes, things will be different.

vldszn 9mo ago

He is lowkey right

yesitcan 9mo ago

AOL still exists?