3 ms·

Meanwhile AI has gotten so good it can just about one shot a SaaS app. I’m not worried about it…

by mountainriver 3mo ago

byzantinegene 3mo ago
that is not production ready
- adamtaylor_13 3mo ago
  Eh, that's not been my company's experience. Error reports are down. Performance is up clients are happy. Pretty soon we're going to have to reckon with the fact that AI writes better code than us.
  - byzantinegene 3mo ago
    so your company runs on a vibe-coded saas app, that sure is a confidence booster for your would-be customers.
    - senordevnyc 3mo ago
      Sounds like they’re happy.
      - selimthegrim 3mo ago
        And own nothing?
        senordevnyc 3mo ago
        Wrong cliche
    - felix-the-cat 3mo ago
      How will the customers know? And if it does what they need it to do, then why would they even care?
      - byzantinegene 3mo ago
        wouldn't take long for them to find out with the developer bragging about it. he one-shot vibe-coded a sass app (keyword: one-shot), that says alot about the quality.
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
  - coffeefirst 3mo ago
    Anything we can see?
    - an0malous 3mo ago
      They never want to show it
epgui 3mo ago
What does that have to do with the article?
georgemcbay 3mo ago
> Meanwhile AI has gotten so good it can just about one shot a SaaS app. There isn't a direct correlation between AI improvement or stagnation and whether or not the amount being spent by AI labs and the associated ecosystem will result in a financial crash. Look into the history of railroads and the internet itself to see how massive levels of investment can result in economic crashes even when the thing being invested in produces real, widespread societal value. One could argue that one of the nightmare economic scenarios for AI is actually that it gets too good too fast and results in a wipeout of the white collar worker that we are currently nowhere near ready to deal with given how propped up our economy is on consumer spending.
- kingleopold 3mo ago
  difference this time is they have "fiat money" and money printer. Market and all inv. bankers knows that in major crash they will print unlimited amounts so back to same prices or near them. printer is still printing and it's only goes to selected investments
  - lstodd 3mo ago
    As if they did not back then. Fiat is just simpler to work with, but one can pull a bubble without it just fine. Anyone forgot the railroad crash of 1873? The tulip mania of 17th century?
    - hdgvhicv 3mo ago
      The dot com bubble of 2000 The Nasdaq took 14 years to recover, 17 once you factor in inflation.
  - byzantinegene 3mo ago
    not at current inflation levels, no way to "print" if it means causing inflation to spike beyond unhealthy levels.
    - kingleopold 3mo ago
samrus 3mo ago
Yeah but the investments arent aiming for churning out SaaS apps. Its to automate large swathes of intellectual labour. Of which only SWE has been cracked yet. There is a question mark as to if the others will crack. If they arent then these investments will collapse from speculation down to reality. That possibility is what is being discussed here As to whether that will happen, I think that risk is real. Because claude code isnt made by the generalozed capabilities of the tech but by good old non-generalozable hueristics and rule based engines. I dont think that will scale to other feilds at the factor these investments assume. Its the bitter lesson again. It scales with deliberate and specific design, not data, so it wont scale We learnt this with ibm watson. Deepblue achieved chess supremacy but the last mile wasnt data driven, it was heiristic driven, and so watson, its successor, couldnt scale/generalize. My prediction is that this speculation on LLMs with harnesses will collapse since they wont scale. We'll have another winter where the reasearchers will be leaft alone long wnough to come up with the next breakthrough (probably game theory based data driven agency) which might then create what this hypecycle is speculating
- byzantinegene 3mo ago
  you mentioned a very good point about scalability. we're seeing alot of productivity gains, but only from SWEs, which are but a very small segment of the global economy. all other economic use cases require thorough last-mile development and iteration that is not too different with current automation tools.
  - felix-the-cat 3mo ago
    A friend who is a psychologist was telling me he thinks in another year or two insurance companies will insist people see an AI therapist first before being willing to pay for a real person.
    - rootusrootus 3mo ago
      LOL, the same AI that has landed companies in court defending themselves against wrongful death lawsuits for helping someone convince themselves suicide is the right answer, and even encouraging them? That AI? I am unclear that any insurance company is going to want a piece of that action anytime soon. What you've just told me is that psychologists, just like SWEs, are prone to thinking they know how business works but in fact know fuck all.
Grombobulous 3mo ago
So good at it that I’m right now in the process of building instead of buying. Here’s how that plays out in the economy: - My company spent $50 on my tokens to build this internal tool - Anthropic spent $XXX to deliver those tokens to me. - The company I was going to buy the tool from lost $XX,XXX per year that I would have paid them. I dunno, kind of sounds like the economy just got smaller. I could usually accept the idea that software getting cheaper generally increases demand for software and expands the economy surrounding it, but I’m not sure if we have precedent for what happens when software becomes positively worthless.
- loeg 3mo ago
  Are you putting the $XX,XXX-50 under your mattress or investing it in something else productive?
  - Grombobulous 3mo ago
    I certainly can’t give you a better answer for my company than “it depends” or “I don’t really know.” The company could just be happy to have better margins and be happy the stock finally went up. It might literally do nothing with them or do something economically unproductive like buy back stock. What I can tell you with certainty is that we aren’t going to hire anyone else or launch any other product as a result. Our business just isn’t at that level of growth potential. Perhaps we can surmise that money going to shareholders can grow the economy. They’ve got more money to reinvest in other stuff. But then again, if everyone can shart out a SaaS app with $50 in tokens, what software companies will they want to invest in? AI gives me that feeling of “what happens to bakers and butchers when the supermarket gets invented and they decide to sell bread and meat at or below cost?”
  - brendoelfrendo 3mo ago
    Unless that money is being spent on more tokens, it'll probably be used for stock buybacks.
    - whall6 3mo ago
overgard 3mo ago
While I don't agree with your premise at all, even if it could one shot a SaaS product (a statement so vague it's meaningless) I don't think there's much of an argument for why that's economically useful. A lot of SaaS has free software/open source equivalents anyway (how else do you think the clanker's are able to plagiarize it?). People still pay for Office even though you could easily use LibreOffice, or GitHub when you could self host Forgejo. It's like when anthropic made a big deal out of making a broken compiler. Neat, so, after ingesting all of open source and burning a trillion tokens you ended up with something worse than what's already out there; and instead of doing something economically useful like giving a person money to build it or supporting the open source ecosystem, you're just wasting energy on datacenters.
triceratops 3mo ago
Why even build SaaS apps? AI can just do what a SaaS app can

Meanwhile AI has gotten so good it can just about one shot a SaaS app. I’m not worried about it…

byzantinegene 3mo ago

that is not production ready

adamtaylor_13 3mo ago
Eh, that's not been my company's experience. Error reports are down. Performance is up clients are happy. Pretty soon we're going to have to reckon with the fact that AI writes better code than us.
- byzantinegene 3mo ago
  so your company runs on a vibe-coded saas app, that sure is a confidence booster for your would-be customers.
  - senordevnyc 3mo ago
    Sounds like they’re happy.
    - selimthegrim 3mo ago
      And own nothing?
      - senordevnyc 3mo ago
        Wrong cliche
  - felix-the-cat 3mo ago
    How will the customers know? And if it does what they need it to do, then why would they even care?
    - byzantinegene 3mo ago
      wouldn't take long for them to find out with the developer bragging about it. he one-shot vibe-coded a sass app (keyword: one-shot), that says alot about the quality.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- coffeefirst 3mo ago
  Anything we can see?
  - an0malous 3mo ago
    They never want to show it

epgui 3mo ago

What does that have to do with the article?

georgemcbay 3mo ago

> Meanwhile AI has gotten so good it can just about one shot a SaaS app. There isn't a direct correlation between AI improvement or stagnation and whether or not the amount being spent by AI labs and the associated ecosystem will result in a financial crash. Look into the history of railroads and the internet itself to see how massive levels of investment can result in economic crashes even when the thing being invested in produces real, widespread societal value. One could argue that one of the nightmare economic scenarios for AI is actually that it gets too good too fast and results in a wipeout of the white collar worker that we are currently nowhere near ready to deal with given how propped up our economy is on consumer spending.

kingleopold 3mo ago
difference this time is they have "fiat money" and money printer. Market and all inv. bankers knows that in major crash they will print unlimited amounts so back to same prices or near them. printer is still printing and it's only goes to selected investments
- lstodd 3mo ago
  As if they did not back then. Fiat is just simpler to work with, but one can pull a bubble without it just fine. Anyone forgot the railroad crash of 1873? The tulip mania of 17th century?
  - hdgvhicv 3mo ago
    The dot com bubble of 2000 The Nasdaq took 14 years to recover, 17 once you factor in inflation.
- byzantinegene 3mo ago
  not at current inflation levels, no way to "print" if it means causing inflation to spike beyond unhealthy levels.
  - kingleopold 3mo ago

samrus 3mo ago

Yeah but the investments arent aiming for churning out SaaS apps. Its to automate large swathes of intellectual labour. Of which only SWE has been cracked yet. There is a question mark as to if the others will crack. If they arent then these investments will collapse from speculation down to reality. That possibility is what is being discussed here As to whether that will happen, I think that risk is real. Because claude code isnt made by the generalozed capabilities of the tech but by good old non-generalozable hueristics and rule based engines. I dont think that will scale to other feilds at the factor these investments assume. Its the bitter lesson again. It scales with deliberate and specific design, not data, so it wont scale We learnt this with ibm watson. Deepblue achieved chess supremacy but the last mile wasnt data driven, it was heiristic driven, and so watson, its successor, couldnt scale/generalize. My prediction is that this speculation on LLMs with harnesses will collapse since they wont scale. We'll have another winter where the reasearchers will be leaft alone long wnough to come up with the next breakthrough (probably game theory based data driven agency) which might then create what this hypecycle is speculating

byzantinegene 3mo ago
you mentioned a very good point about scalability. we're seeing alot of productivity gains, but only from SWEs, which are but a very small segment of the global economy. all other economic use cases require thorough last-mile development and iteration that is not too different with current automation tools.
- felix-the-cat 3mo ago
  A friend who is a psychologist was telling me he thinks in another year or two insurance companies will insist people see an AI therapist first before being willing to pay for a real person.
  - rootusrootus 3mo ago
    LOL, the same AI that has landed companies in court defending themselves against wrongful death lawsuits for helping someone convince themselves suicide is the right answer, and even encouraging them? That AI? I am unclear that any insurance company is going to want a piece of that action anytime soon. What you've just told me is that psychologists, just like SWEs, are prone to thinking they know how business works but in fact know fuck all.

Grombobulous 3mo ago

So good at it that I’m right now in the process of building instead of buying. Here’s how that plays out in the economy: - My company spent $50 on my tokens to build this internal tool - Anthropic spent $XXX to deliver those tokens to me. - The company I was going to buy the tool from lost $XX,XXX per year that I would have paid them. I dunno, kind of sounds like the economy just got smaller. I could usually accept the idea that software getting cheaper generally increases demand for software and expands the economy surrounding it, but I’m not sure if we have precedent for what happens when software becomes positively worthless.

loeg 3mo ago
Are you putting the $XX,XXX-50 under your mattress or investing it in something else productive?
- Grombobulous 3mo ago
  I certainly can’t give you a better answer for my company than “it depends” or “I don’t really know.” The company could just be happy to have better margins and be happy the stock finally went up. It might literally do nothing with them or do something economically unproductive like buy back stock. What I can tell you with certainty is that we aren’t going to hire anyone else or launch any other product as a result. Our business just isn’t at that level of growth potential. Perhaps we can surmise that money going to shareholders can grow the economy. They’ve got more money to reinvest in other stuff. But then again, if everyone can shart out a SaaS app with $50 in tokens, what software companies will they want to invest in? AI gives me that feeling of “what happens to bakers and butchers when the supermarket gets invented and they decide to sell bread and meat at or below cost?”
- brendoelfrendo 3mo ago
  Unless that money is being spent on more tokens, it'll probably be used for stock buybacks.
  - whall6 3mo ago

overgard 3mo ago

While I don't agree with your premise at all, even if it could one shot a SaaS product (a statement so vague it's meaningless) I don't think there's much of an argument for why that's economically useful. A lot of SaaS has free software/open source equivalents anyway (how else do you think the clanker's are able to plagiarize it?). People still pay for Office even though you could easily use LibreOffice, or GitHub when you could self host Forgejo. It's like when anthropic made a big deal out of making a broken compiler. Neat, so, after ingesting all of open source and burning a trillion tokens you ended up with something worse than what's already out there; and instead of doing something economically useful like giving a person money to build it or supporting the open source ecosystem, you're just wasting energy on datacenters.

triceratops 3mo ago

Why even build SaaS apps? AI can just do what a SaaS app can