(1) https://philippdubach.com/posts/the-saaspocalypse-paradox/

(2) 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-worl...) take, which I take as a sign the argument is landing..

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Apparently the meal is over and now we're just rearranging the plates.

> "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

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.

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.

We have products we're paying $100k a year for and using 3% of the functionality. And they suck. This is the target.

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.

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.

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.

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.

- 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

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.

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.

You don’t understand what’s happening if you dismiss the leverage provided by AI as “vibe coding”.

https://github.com/n8n-io/n8n

https://github.com/activepieces/activepieces

https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill

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.

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.

  | 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

  - 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)

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...

[1] 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.

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.

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).

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.

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

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.