3 ms·

Problem is without LLMs I’m making a contact lead form with some basic stuff and calling it good. With them, I’m making the whole SaaS. I just made the best DM

Problem is without LLMs I’m making a contact lead form with some basic stuff and calling it good. With them, I’m making the whole SaaS. I just made the best DM experience last night. I never would have before. Feels and looks just like iMessage, because the users are coming from that, and it’s just for a small biz. It’s been planned for a while because the messages involve so much file sharing, it was time to build a custom solution, but I had been putting it off because there’s a lot of moving parts. Doing our own in-house e-signing, email marketing, invoicing too. With just me as the dev. Other options from vendors were too expensive and complicated. Built an invoicing product too, it even writes a pretty good note based on all previous notes for that client. Almost every business integration - outside a few like payments, hosting, email - become code problems. If you’re doing it right you should be building more than you ever have before. And btw random non-devs like car rental hosts and barbers are doing the basic site lead form type stuff for their businesses so without LLMs you’re now doing only beginner stuff. You won’t seem like a real dev anymore. Any random can use that vercel product and it even deploys to a URL. That’s the small biz prosumer case. The real devs should be doing massive projects a rando can’t do. Or one that displaces an expensive or complicated integration. Tons of opportunity at every corner.

amelius 22d ago
Who needs a SaaS when you can just ask AI to write a private one just made for you?
- srcreigh 22d ago
  At least for now, not everybody can make a private SaaS. Doing that requires skills and focus. Even with SOTA models, as of ~today, there are inflection points where the AI would not be able to make the right choice without a knowledgable human, or would cycle and waste time with things that don't matter, etc.
  - jenniferhooley 21d ago
    Not really true tbh. Plenty of 50 year old business guys with less than zero technical ability making saas startups over months of focused chats with LLMs. Of course they're slower at making stuff and the projects are worse than a smart engineer, but they can definitely ship and run to thousands of real customers.
    - xquce 21d ago
      Is every 50 year old business guy doing it? If not then OPs comment holds. He said not everyone can, not that only devs can use it, which is true.
    - wyantb 21d ago
      "not everybody" vs "50 year old business guys...months of focused chats" - I don't think you're really disagreeing here? That's also a niche population. One that knows their domain very well, absolutely, personally I think it's cool that they can DIY what they need. But still a niche population. That's not your proverbial 20year old kid right out of school with ADHD pumping out world class software. Aside - is AI still DIY? We need a new DAIY category for AI empowered works?
      - jenniferhooley 21d ago
        No they don't know the domain at all. I think one of the startups brings in around $10K a month now. They know nothing about the domain only that it brings in money (i.e. they run thousands of startup "tests" and this one seemed to be easiest to make money from), and even less about code (have no idea what a variable is). I just think devs are coping by thinking that saas startups have any barrier to entry at all. You are now competing with every single person on the planet who wants to make money sitting at home on a computer, and likely the business guy with zero skill or craftsmanship is going to beat you. The only thing with barrier to entry is insanely complex software (e.g., what used to take a genius team of 10 multiple years to make) and or more creative software like video games (where you need extreme care and taste to get something anyone will look at for > 2 hours). Average saas products require no skill or craftsmanship and literally anyone including our grandmas can make it (assuming they will take a few months at least to chat with an LLM). To be clear I think this is great! More better software, people with smaller needs can have llms build it for them totally bespoke. For those of us with skills we have to move WAY out of our old comfort zone and make way cooler things, a standard saas that takes a few months isn't something we should waste our time on anymore.
- __MatrixMan__ 22d ago
  Removing dependency on SaaS has so far been my favorite use of AI. I hope we kill it off entirely. Software is better off as a tool. Making it a product typically ruins it.
  - wanderlust123 21d ago
    People pay for good tools. Tools help create value, and if they are good at creating value the toolmaker should be compensated.
    - whstl 21d ago
      If so, people can just pay Anthropic or OpenAI directly. They are great toolmakers.
  - bluefirebrand 21d ago
    Software is fine as a product, it is when it becomes a service that it sucks
    - __MatrixMan__ 13d ago
      Service or otherwise, making a tool into a product still requires that you to embrace a whole raft of design constraints that have nothing to do with helping the user do the thing. Maybe there are cases where those constraints don't degrade utility to the point where your product is now worse than the best open source alternative, but they're few and far between.
- ozgung 21d ago
  There is a small web service I need with a price tag of $39 one time payment. I’m current doing it myself for the last 1.5 hours, because I thought it would be fun. 2 minutes ago I upgraded to $120 subscription of Codex. Reasonable thing was to pay $39 and forget about it.
  - cube00 21d ago
    As much as I hate subscriptions, one time payment for ongoing access to a web service never lasts.
- marginalia_nu 21d ago
  Most larger businesses are kinda resistant to building stuff in house since it means that stuff has to be owned and maintained for as long as its needed (possibly decades) and you can't just rely on a SLA and the legal team to ensure things are working in perpetuity. The danger of vibe coded SaaS:es isn't the customer building the thing themselves, but that the increased competition drives down the profit margin.
- DidntUseIt 21d ago
  This is exactly how it works. I said “AI make it rain” and now I run multiple international businesses.
cmiles74 22d ago
I’m not sure how this is responding to the post… I think the author is going for something different, and that it’s not necessarily about getting things done quickly or implementing every feature on their list. More about the journey and learning along the way, feeling ownership of their project, etc.
- anhyz 21d ago
  Some people like _making_ things, and some people like making _things_.
  - runarberg 21d ago
    Sound more like the latter group likes having things made for them, ideally without paying for it.
    - eklavya 21d ago
      That's not how I read it at all. Why do you think the latter group likes free stuff made for them?
      - vouaobrasil 21d ago
        I think it's more like the latter group likes the dopamine hit brought on my getting attention from release stuff.
        DidntUseIt 21d ago
        I never even said what the product is, it's for my job. Maybe you get a dopamine hit from comments like that.
      - bigstrat2003 21d ago
        Right now the AI companies are selling their product at a loss to try to get us hooked. I think it's fair to describe the current situation as "unreasonably cheap", though free is a bit of a stretch.
__MatrixMan__ 22d ago
I don't know where all of your shoulds are coming from. I too am having a lot of fun building with AI, but I can see how it might not appeal to everyone. And I think the people it doesn't appeal to, I think we need perspectives like theirs.
coldtea 22d ago
[flagged]
- DidntUseIt 21d ago
  [flagged]
  - Chris2048 21d ago
    > this is HackerNews so get used to people like me You joined 2 days ago..
    - LolSeriously2 21d ago
      [flagged]
  - cindyllm 21d ago
    [dead]
- mabini 21d ago
  [dead]
- ofjcihen 21d ago
  3 responses, all from green accounts basically hurling the same vitriol at you. Has someone gone and made 3 accounts to make it seem like their take is more popular?
  - WhatDoYouKnow1 21d ago
    [flagged]
  - DidntUseIt 21d ago
    [flagged]
  - DidntUseIt 21d ago
    [flagged]
embedding-shape 21d ago
> so without LLMs you’re now doing only beginner stuff. You won’t seem like a real dev anymore. I think it's the opposite. When I'm on the edges of Real Difficult Stuff (TM), then LLMs are less of help compared to when I just need basic web applications or similar "beginner stuff". If what you're working on doesn't exists in the training data at all, the LLMs can sometimes be more in the way than helpful, as they don't seem to even "grasp" the problems correctly. I still get tons of productivity boosts from LLMs, don't get me wrong, and I wouldn't stop working with them even though they aren't perfect for everything, they do with a lot of monotonous tasks, like all the stuff you outlined. But the moments I'm working without LLMs, that's the time I'm working very much on "not beginner stuff".
- wanderlust123 21d ago
  What is this real difficult stuff you speak of that only you can do and LLMs can not?
  - sampullman 21d ago
    Write a decent comment, for one. It struggles with some of the firmware stuff I do, though that's more due to a lack of a proper automated feedback loop.
    - disgruntledphd2 21d ago
      Yeah, it's generally the harness around the model that makes it useful.
  - beej71 21d ago
    I don't have a concrete example, but it's probably the stuff that starts taking longer to describe in English than to code. "Make me this thing there are a million examples of" vs. "make me this unique thing in this exact, particular way". I don't think there's anything an LLM can't write given enough direction. (It's a one-sentence fuck-it one-off on one end of the spectrum, and it degenerately ends with you giving it exact code and prompting it to echo it back to you on the other.) But the jobs of making basic apps and web pages are the new WordPress jobs in terms of pay, I'd agree.
ThePhysicist 21d ago
Yeah sure, let's go and vibe code your own e-signing solution with Claude. Sure you can do it, LLMs never say no but if someone with actual e-signing expertise would start probing the LLM about what it actually did I'm sure we would see a lof of "Actually you're right to push back", "You're right that was entirely wrong, that's on me!", "Fair point, I did not consider that"... LLMs are still a joke when it comes to implementing complex software where domain knowledge and "precision" is important, maybe some day they will be able to do that but we're not there. If they were good at precision and consistency and thinking we would see tons of high quality LLM written novels and books as well, but all we see is utter garbage that no one considers literature. In the same vein, unsupervised vibe-coded software isn't real software to me, it's garbage. You can produce high quality software with LLMs, but definitely not as an amateur without domain knowledge just prompting your way to something that resembles working software. I find people that are the "unconscious incompetence" stage of software development absolutely love them because they produce output that looks fine to them and they can't find anything wrong with it because they simply lack the ability to perceive quality. For a contact widget that might be acceptable as it will be used a few dozen times so who cares if it breaks, but let's not pretend you can actually build a compliant e-signing or invoicing software without having domain expertise and investing a ton of editing/revision time. Put more bluntly, a domain expert that, as of currently, refuses to use LLMs can easily start using LLMs in their work, an idiot who uses LLMs cannot easily become a domain expert. Now let's think about who you would rather hire or who do you think will have the better future career outlook. Pretty damning how many people here are willing to reject the idea that domain expertise or ability to write program code yourself is a waste of resources.
- xorgun 21d ago
  [dead]
- cat-snatcher 21d ago
  You did a wonderful job of constructing a strawman and DESTROYING it in your comment! AI can't build an e-signing solution, but you, the expert of experts, can do it! Good job!
maplethorpe 21d ago
You could do this before AI, though. Just download a big repo off github and build the binaries yourself. Or is that not enough obfuscation to convince yourself you made it?
- DidntUseIt 21d ago
  Never would have. I love the argument that “AI code doesn’t feel like mine :(“ but you’ll use some shit library from 12 years ago?? Are any of you actually developers? Ffs
  - maplethorpe 21d ago
    Well no I, wasn't doing that either. Because it would be kind of silly to take someone else's code and say "I made this" just because I ran some build script, wouldn't it?
DidntUseIt 21d ago
[flagged]
rogerrogerr 21d ago
> file sharing > LLMs It’s probably worth doing a very thorough audit of how you’re handling user-uploaded files, it’s full of non-obvious footguns.
- DidntUseIt 21d ago
  I bet you don’t know the MIME type for MS Word doc off the top of your head. Do you? So why would I take your advice on this topic? I bet there are 1000 other things you don’t know about file uploads. The LLM does know, and if I think it looks weird I can research it manually. It’s called: Being of normal functioning intelligence And caring about the product and the work (and the money!)
  - thunderfork 21d ago
    Off the top of my head, I know there's more than one ;)
  - rogerrogerr 21d ago
    I have no idea why you’re so mad. Also, this is a forum where you’re somewhat likely to run into people who worked on Word at Microsoft. That seems like enough of an answer to your question.
mcv 21d ago
Same here. Mind you, I share the many concerns about AI. I agree the industry has gone nuts. I warn everybody that "use more AI" is terrible advice and a terrible strategy. And why are the people saying that AGI could kill us all, the same people who are racing to bring it about? But: there's a complex business related project I care deeply about. Due to corporate red tape and office politics I couldn't fix it the way I wanted to when I actually worked there, but after I left, I built the solution I had in mind (mostly out of frustration at first, but it's starting to look like a viable product). And thanks to LLMs, I can tackle it on a much larger scale, build it faster, control it better (to my surprise), and I can also plan the really business aspects around it, including how to sell something like this, which is absolutely a first for me. So I feel like thanks to Claude, I can actually solve problems more effectively, on a larger scale, and I feel like I'm now working on a higher level than ever before. Compare it to the step from thinking about memory allocation and loop indices to thinking about algorithmic complexity, performance and memory footprint. From thinking about a single feature request to thinking about how the program can solve a complex business problem. Perhaps I'm more architect than programmer now, but I'm still deeply involved with the code, even if Claude now writes most of it. I'm still having fun. Although that might also partially be because I'm free from that restrictive corporate environment and can actually do what I want. (For now; eventually I do have to figure out how to make money from this.)

amelius 22d ago

Who needs a SaaS when you can just ask AI to write a private one just made for you?

srcreigh 22d ago
At least for now, not everybody can make a private SaaS. Doing that requires skills and focus. Even with SOTA models, as of ~today, there are inflection points where the AI would not be able to make the right choice without a knowledgable human, or would cycle and waste time with things that don't matter, etc.
- jenniferhooley 21d ago
  Not really true tbh. Plenty of 50 year old business guys with less than zero technical ability making saas startups over months of focused chats with LLMs. Of course they're slower at making stuff and the projects are worse than a smart engineer, but they can definitely ship and run to thousands of real customers.
  - xquce 21d ago
    Is every 50 year old business guy doing it? If not then OPs comment holds. He said not everyone can, not that only devs can use it, which is true.
  - wyantb 21d ago
    "not everybody" vs "50 year old business guys...months of focused chats" - I don't think you're really disagreeing here? That's also a niche population. One that knows their domain very well, absolutely, personally I think it's cool that they can DIY what they need. But still a niche population. That's not your proverbial 20year old kid right out of school with ADHD pumping out world class software. Aside - is AI still DIY? We need a new DAIY category for AI empowered works?
    - jenniferhooley 21d ago
      No they don't know the domain at all. I think one of the startups brings in around $10K a month now. They know nothing about the domain only that it brings in money (i.e. they run thousands of startup "tests" and this one seemed to be easiest to make money from), and even less about code (have no idea what a variable is). I just think devs are coping by thinking that saas startups have any barrier to entry at all. You are now competing with every single person on the planet who wants to make money sitting at home on a computer, and likely the business guy with zero skill or craftsmanship is going to beat you. The only thing with barrier to entry is insanely complex software (e.g., what used to take a genius team of 10 multiple years to make) and or more creative software like video games (where you need extreme care and taste to get something anyone will look at for > 2 hours). Average saas products require no skill or craftsmanship and literally anyone including our grandmas can make it (assuming they will take a few months at least to chat with an LLM). To be clear I think this is great! More better software, people with smaller needs can have llms build it for them totally bespoke. For those of us with skills we have to move WAY out of our old comfort zone and make way cooler things, a standard saas that takes a few months isn't something we should waste our time on anymore.
__MatrixMan__ 22d ago
Removing dependency on SaaS has so far been my favorite use of AI. I hope we kill it off entirely. Software is better off as a tool. Making it a product typically ruins it.
- wanderlust123 21d ago
  People pay for good tools. Tools help create value, and if they are good at creating value the toolmaker should be compensated.
  - whstl 21d ago
    If so, people can just pay Anthropic or OpenAI directly. They are great toolmakers.
- bluefirebrand 21d ago
  Software is fine as a product, it is when it becomes a service that it sucks
  - __MatrixMan__ 13d ago
    Service or otherwise, making a tool into a product still requires that you to embrace a whole raft of design constraints that have nothing to do with helping the user do the thing. Maybe there are cases where those constraints don't degrade utility to the point where your product is now worse than the best open source alternative, but they're few and far between.
ozgung 21d ago
There is a small web service I need with a price tag of $39 one time payment. I’m current doing it myself for the last 1.5 hours, because I thought it would be fun. 2 minutes ago I upgraded to $120 subscription of Codex. Reasonable thing was to pay $39 and forget about it.
- cube00 21d ago
  As much as I hate subscriptions, one time payment for ongoing access to a web service never lasts.
marginalia_nu 21d ago
Most larger businesses are kinda resistant to building stuff in house since it means that stuff has to be owned and maintained for as long as its needed (possibly decades) and you can't just rely on a SLA and the legal team to ensure things are working in perpetuity. The danger of vibe coded SaaS:es isn't the customer building the thing themselves, but that the increased competition drives down the profit margin.
DidntUseIt 21d ago
This is exactly how it works. I said “AI make it rain” and now I run multiple international businesses.

cmiles74 22d ago

I’m not sure how this is responding to the post… I think the author is going for something different, and that it’s not necessarily about getting things done quickly or implementing every feature on their list. More about the journey and learning along the way, feeling ownership of their project, etc.

anhyz 21d ago
Some people like _making_ things, and some people like making _things_.
- runarberg 21d ago
  Sound more like the latter group likes having things made for them, ideally without paying for it.
  - eklavya 21d ago
    That's not how I read it at all. Why do you think the latter group likes free stuff made for them?
    - vouaobrasil 21d ago
      I think it's more like the latter group likes the dopamine hit brought on my getting attention from release stuff.
      - DidntUseIt 21d ago
        I never even said what the product is, it's for my job. Maybe you get a dopamine hit from comments like that.
    - bigstrat2003 21d ago
      Right now the AI companies are selling their product at a loss to try to get us hooked. I think it's fair to describe the current situation as "unreasonably cheap", though free is a bit of a stretch.

__MatrixMan__ 22d ago

I don't know where all of your shoulds are coming from. I too am having a lot of fun building with AI, but I can see how it might not appeal to everyone. And I think the people it doesn't appeal to, I think we need perspectives like theirs.

coldtea 22d ago

[flagged]

DidntUseIt 21d ago
[flagged]
- Chris2048 21d ago
  > this is HackerNews so get used to people like me You joined 2 days ago..
  - LolSeriously2 21d ago
    [flagged]
- cindyllm 21d ago
  [dead]
mabini 21d ago
[dead]
ofjcihen 21d ago
3 responses, all from green accounts basically hurling the same vitriol at you. Has someone gone and made 3 accounts to make it seem like their take is more popular?
- WhatDoYouKnow1 21d ago
  [flagged]
- DidntUseIt 21d ago
  [flagged]
- DidntUseIt 21d ago
  [flagged]

embedding-shape 21d ago

> so without LLMs you’re now doing only beginner stuff. You won’t seem like a real dev anymore. I think it's the opposite. When I'm on the edges of Real Difficult Stuff (TM), then LLMs are less of help compared to when I just need basic web applications or similar "beginner stuff". If what you're working on doesn't exists in the training data at all, the LLMs can sometimes be more in the way than helpful, as they don't seem to even "grasp" the problems correctly. I still get tons of productivity boosts from LLMs, don't get me wrong, and I wouldn't stop working with them even though they aren't perfect for everything, they do with a lot of monotonous tasks, like all the stuff you outlined. But the moments I'm working without LLMs, that's the time I'm working very much on "not beginner stuff".

wanderlust123 21d ago
What is this real difficult stuff you speak of that only you can do and LLMs can not?
- sampullman 21d ago
  Write a decent comment, for one. It struggles with some of the firmware stuff I do, though that's more due to a lack of a proper automated feedback loop.
  - disgruntledphd2 21d ago
    Yeah, it's generally the harness around the model that makes it useful.
- beej71 21d ago
  I don't have a concrete example, but it's probably the stuff that starts taking longer to describe in English than to code. "Make me this thing there are a million examples of" vs. "make me this unique thing in this exact, particular way". I don't think there's anything an LLM can't write given enough direction. (It's a one-sentence fuck-it one-off on one end of the spectrum, and it degenerately ends with you giving it exact code and prompting it to echo it back to you on the other.) But the jobs of making basic apps and web pages are the new WordPress jobs in terms of pay, I'd agree.

ThePhysicist 21d ago

Yeah sure, let's go and vibe code your own e-signing solution with Claude. Sure you can do it, LLMs never say no but if someone with actual e-signing expertise would start probing the LLM about what it actually did I'm sure we would see a lof of "Actually you're right to push back", "You're right that was entirely wrong, that's on me!", "Fair point, I did not consider that"... LLMs are still a joke when it comes to implementing complex software where domain knowledge and "precision" is important, maybe some day they will be able to do that but we're not there. If they were good at precision and consistency and thinking we would see tons of high quality LLM written novels and books as well, but all we see is utter garbage that no one considers literature. In the same vein, unsupervised vibe-coded software isn't real software to me, it's garbage. You can produce high quality software with LLMs, but definitely not as an amateur without domain knowledge just prompting your way to something that resembles working software. I find people that are the "unconscious incompetence" stage of software development absolutely love them because they produce output that looks fine to them and they can't find anything wrong with it because they simply lack the ability to perceive quality. For a contact widget that might be acceptable as it will be used a few dozen times so who cares if it breaks, but let's not pretend you can actually build a compliant e-signing or invoicing software without having domain expertise and investing a ton of editing/revision time. Put more bluntly, a domain expert that, as of currently, refuses to use LLMs can easily start using LLMs in their work, an idiot who uses LLMs cannot easily become a domain expert. Now let's think about who you would rather hire or who do you think will have the better future career outlook. Pretty damning how many people here are willing to reject the idea that domain expertise or ability to write program code yourself is a waste of resources.

xorgun 21d ago
[dead]
cat-snatcher 21d ago
You did a wonderful job of constructing a strawman and DESTROYING it in your comment! AI can't build an e-signing solution, but you, the expert of experts, can do it! Good job!

maplethorpe 21d ago

You could do this before AI, though. Just download a big repo off github and build the binaries yourself. Or is that not enough obfuscation to convince yourself you made it?

DidntUseIt 21d ago
Never would have. I love the argument that “AI code doesn’t feel like mine :(“ but you’ll use some shit library from 12 years ago?? Are any of you actually developers? Ffs
- maplethorpe 21d ago
  Well no I, wasn't doing that either. Because it would be kind of silly to take someone else's code and say "I made this" just because I ran some build script, wouldn't it?

DidntUseIt 21d ago

[flagged]

rogerrogerr 21d ago

> file sharing > LLMs It’s probably worth doing a very thorough audit of how you’re handling user-uploaded files, it’s full of non-obvious footguns.

DidntUseIt 21d ago
I bet you don’t know the MIME type for MS Word doc off the top of your head. Do you? So why would I take your advice on this topic? I bet there are 1000 other things you don’t know about file uploads. The LLM does know, and if I think it looks weird I can research it manually. It’s called: Being of normal functioning intelligence And caring about the product and the work (and the money!)
- thunderfork 21d ago
  Off the top of my head, I know there's more than one ;)
- rogerrogerr 21d ago
  I have no idea why you’re so mad. Also, this is a forum where you’re somewhat likely to run into people who worked on Word at Microsoft. That seems like enough of an answer to your question.

mcv 21d ago

Same here. Mind you, I share the many concerns about AI. I agree the industry has gone nuts. I warn everybody that "use more AI" is terrible advice and a terrible strategy. And why are the people saying that AGI could kill us all, the same people who are racing to bring it about? But: there's a complex business related project I care deeply about. Due to corporate red tape and office politics I couldn't fix it the way I wanted to when I actually worked there, but after I left, I built the solution I had in mind (mostly out of frustration at first, but it's starting to look like a viable product). And thanks to LLMs, I can tackle it on a much larger scale, build it faster, control it better (to my surprise), and I can also plan the really business aspects around it, including how to sell something like this, which is absolutely a first for me. So I feel like thanks to Claude, I can actually solve problems more effectively, on a larger scale, and I feel like I'm now working on a higher level than ever before. Compare it to the step from thinking about memory allocation and loop indices to thinking about algorithmic complexity, performance and memory footprint. From thinking about a single feature request to thinking about how the program can solve a complex business problem. Perhaps I'm more architect than programmer now, but I'm still deeply involved with the code, even if Claude now writes most of it. I'm still having fun. Although that might also partially be because I'm free from that restrictive corporate environment and can actually do what I want. (For now; eventually I do have to figure out how to make money from this.)