3 ms·

This is a great example of a general trend, which is why I don't think SaaS is going anywhere. The bar may be raised, but it's not going anywhere. HackerOne and

by jerf 2mo ago

This is a great example of a general trend, which is why I don't think SaaS is going anywhere. The bar may be raised, but it's not going anywhere. HackerOne and SaaS in general makes problems go away for money. If you use your own tokens and solve it yourself, it's still your problem. The deficiencies are your problem. The support and ongoing maintenance are your problem. Discovering some country split in two and now has to have currency handled in some other way is still your problem. And they never end. I see some people with the idea that businesses are going to use AI to solve everything in their own one-off bespoke manners for everything, but I don't think it's going to happen. What's going to happen is that the SaaS providers are going to get even better at making yet more stuff go away than they were before and it'll actually be harder for a business to replicate it themselves then it used to be. (Of course the "go away" isn't perfect, but clearly, neither is the idea that solving everything yourself with AI is either.)

ceejayoz 2mo ago
> If you use your own tokens and solve it yourself, it's still your problem. The flip side, of course, is that I can fix my problem - which may be unique and not something a large SaaS will ever do - on my timeline.
- jerf 2mo ago
  That's not a new flip side, though. That's always been with us. SaaS will be more able to take on more requirements then they used to be but no one SaaS will ever be able to take on everything. And the decision between "roll our own and own it forever versus buy this one service that almost does everything we need, but not quite, but maybe it's worth living with it because it's still better than rolling it ourselves" isn't going anywhere either. I would not want to be a SaaS that offers some really simple service that can be replicated in a heartbeat, though. Something like "how do I pay people all over the world" is already very complicated, and over the next decades as governments start writing laws with the understanding that AIs can implement them in code no matter how complicated they are, it's likely these problems will become even more complicated and even more important to just buy a service that can deal with them. (I'm not celebrating that, merely predicting it.) But I sure wouldn't want to be selling some super simple scheduled reminder service or something else really small. In the worst case, envision a world where home owner associations or townships or whatever other local governmental division of just perhaps a few hundred people start levying sales taxes, with their own complicated exclusions and offsets and conditions, because LLMs make it possible to handle the code for all of the literally hundreds of thousands or millions of such jurisdictions. Even if you can throw tokens at that problem to solve it yourself, you probably don't want to. And again... I'm not celebrating that. More a world-weary bowing to the inevitable despite it being an obviously bad idea.
  - ceejayoz 2mo ago
    > That's always been with us. But the ability to meaningfully make a personal implementation has changed.
  - Eridrus 2mo ago
    I think there is a chance that this changes. I think there might be space for "source available" enterprise software where you can use an LLM to modify it in a way that is cheap to continue reintegrating in new releases. It may also be reasonable to send your prompts to the vendor and see if it is a feature they are willing to maintain.
conmod278 2mo ago
> This is a great example of a general trend, which is why I don't think SaaS is going anywhere. One learning I can share from the indie game industry is copycats become dime a dozen when a particular game becomes successful. With execution becoming nearly cheap, tasty products and their behaviour will be copied and competition will rise substantially.
- Eridrus 2mo ago
  Are there many copycats that are meaningfully impacting the revenue of games? You can argue that games are derivative, but I think most revenue still goes to premier titles, not knock offs.
- jerf 2mo ago
  I feel like there's this assumption that some people picked up a few months back and never examined, that the big guys were going to keep plodding along with the same old methodologies and the little nimble guys with AI might be able to nimbly out play them. But the simple truth is 100 programmers with AI are going to do a lot more work than 1 or 2 programmers with AI. All the usual considerations for communication overhead and all the old reasons why 100 programmers aren't necessarily 100 times as productive as 1 are in play... but so are all the reasons why that group of 100 programmers is going to outdo that 1 no matter how hard that 1 works. We are probably in roughly the middle phase of the time period when we're still learning to harness AIs at all, and seeing simply some modest accelerations of process. Eventually we're going to progress to getting significantly enhanced productivity from them for pretty much everybody. And then what will happen is not that the SaaS market crashes, but what constitutes an entry-level SaaS product will rise up to meet the increased programming firepower. Find me a SaaS whose current two-year roadmap is "Eh, don't do anything, really, we're set" and I'll show you the SaaS company who probably ought to be really, really worried about AI eliminating their entire niche. I'm sure there are some out there, but it's not the usual SaaS company experience.
  - conmod278 2mo ago
    Teams is exactly that. I think in this modern age of AI, Distribution is the main winner everywhere.

by jerf 2mo ago

ceejayoz 2mo ago

> If you use your own tokens and solve it yourself, it's still your problem. The flip side, of course, is that I can fix my problem - which may be unique and not something a large SaaS will ever do - on my timeline.

jerf 2mo ago
That's not a new flip side, though. That's always been with us. SaaS will be more able to take on more requirements then they used to be but no one SaaS will ever be able to take on everything. And the decision between "roll our own and own it forever versus buy this one service that almost does everything we need, but not quite, but maybe it's worth living with it because it's still better than rolling it ourselves" isn't going anywhere either. I would not want to be a SaaS that offers some really simple service that can be replicated in a heartbeat, though. Something like "how do I pay people all over the world" is already very complicated, and over the next decades as governments start writing laws with the understanding that AIs can implement them in code no matter how complicated they are, it's likely these problems will become even more complicated and even more important to just buy a service that can deal with them. (I'm not celebrating that, merely predicting it.) But I sure wouldn't want to be selling some super simple scheduled reminder service or something else really small. In the worst case, envision a world where home owner associations or townships or whatever other local governmental division of just perhaps a few hundred people start levying sales taxes, with their own complicated exclusions and offsets and conditions, because LLMs make it possible to handle the code for all of the literally hundreds of thousands or millions of such jurisdictions. Even if you can throw tokens at that problem to solve it yourself, you probably don't want to. And again... I'm not celebrating that. More a world-weary bowing to the inevitable despite it being an obviously bad idea.
- ceejayoz 2mo ago
  > That's always been with us. But the ability to meaningfully make a personal implementation has changed.
- Eridrus 2mo ago
  I think there is a chance that this changes. I think there might be space for "source available" enterprise software where you can use an LLM to modify it in a way that is cheap to continue reintegrating in new releases. It may also be reasonable to send your prompts to the vendor and see if it is a feature they are willing to maintain.

conmod278 2mo ago

> This is a great example of a general trend, which is why I don't think SaaS is going anywhere. One learning I can share from the indie game industry is copycats become dime a dozen when a particular game becomes successful. With execution becoming nearly cheap, tasty products and their behaviour will be copied and competition will rise substantially.

Eridrus 2mo ago
Are there many copycats that are meaningfully impacting the revenue of games? You can argue that games are derivative, but I think most revenue still goes to premier titles, not knock offs.
jerf 2mo ago
I feel like there's this assumption that some people picked up a few months back and never examined, that the big guys were going to keep plodding along with the same old methodologies and the little nimble guys with AI might be able to nimbly out play them. But the simple truth is 100 programmers with AI are going to do a lot more work than 1 or 2 programmers with AI. All the usual considerations for communication overhead and all the old reasons why 100 programmers aren't necessarily 100 times as productive as 1 are in play... but so are all the reasons why that group of 100 programmers is going to outdo that 1 no matter how hard that 1 works. We are probably in roughly the middle phase of the time period when we're still learning to harness AIs at all, and seeing simply some modest accelerations of process. Eventually we're going to progress to getting significantly enhanced productivity from them for pretty much everybody. And then what will happen is not that the SaaS market crashes, but what constitutes an entry-level SaaS product will rise up to meet the increased programming firepower. Find me a SaaS whose current two-year roadmap is "Eh, don't do anything, really, we're set" and I'll show you the SaaS company who probably ought to be really, really worried about AI eliminating their entire niche. I'm sure there are some out there, but it's not the usual SaaS company experience.
- conmod278 2mo ago
  Teams is exactly that. I think in this modern age of AI, Distribution is the main winner everywhere.