The initial reaction I think most people have to this is "SaaS companies/devs are in trouble."

I actually think the opposite is true.

With an outpouring of vibe-coded apps/SaaS, you have the new wave of vulnerabilities/leaks/problems that happen even with the best software. Except now, it's worse because it's being done on platforms "built" by people who haven't the slightest clue how they work.

One of many examples: https://dig.watch/updates/women-only-dating-app-tea-suffers-...

This I imagine will, over time, erode trust in most apps/SaaS products. With that erosion of trust will come skepticism and with that, will come trust in the "old faithful" of SaaS products/companies. Basecamp is a good example of this.

I could be wrong on this one, but it seems to me those that have built credibility for privacy/security/competence will become more valuable in the AI age, not less.

Nobody is going to ask Chat GPT to write them an app. They'll just ask something like "show me all the nearby restaurants that don't have any shellfish products for allergic reasons and let me browse like on ubereats", and Chat GPT will (eventually) do the right thing.

People will just see some UI, which will be like many UIs they've seen before. They won't care whether that UI is some UberEats embed designed by a programmer in California, or something that Chat GPT just came up with on the spot to wrap some API.

"Eventually, everybody is going to use computers" was a ridiculous thesis in the age of mainframes. It was a slightly less ridiculous (if still unlikely) thesis in the age of minicomputers. In the DOS days, it started to look likely, in the Windows days, it seemed inevitable, iOS and Android is what made it actually happen.

That means we'll see even more niche apps, and more custom apps.

That doesn't mean everyone becomes a builder.

It means that the people who can build can now do so much more cheaply. Custom apps that were previously too expensive may now be cost-effective.

https://forstarters.substack.com/p/for-starters-72-vibe-code...

The world these investors are envisioning is not one where a software engineer gives a detailed spec to a model and reviews its output, deploys the resulting files and monitors said application. It’s where Jo-shmo at the law firm can tell the model “give me a new billing system”, and the AI does everything correctly and better than a team of software engineers, in a matter of minutes or hours. And that AI maintains it for them, better than the engineers would have

AI doesn't solve for ideas and product market fit. But it did allow me to fail pretty fast before I sunk too much time into it. But also, I should have spoken to potential users earlier rather than vibe coding.

I think this is probably true, and basically how I got into software myself.

I always dabbled in writing software and things for the web, but for some reason I never thought studying computer science would be any fun and that a career as a software developer sounded boring. But then I got an actual full time office job and oh boy, did my perspective on things change fast.

That first job did not have anything to do with writing software at all. But I saw people struggle with things that seemed to me trivial to automate, such as making annotations on paper bank statements and entering them into the system line-by-line. The bookkeeping system did support electronic bank statements, but lacked features to match certain descriptions to certain cost places. In the end it was indeed faster to go the paper route... It took me a couple of hours to write something that saved hours every week and that basically kick started my software career.

Would AI have made much of a difference here? Yes, in terms of getting to the correct solution faster, but probably not in terms of who would have done that. People would still come to the person who came up with the solution to ask for maintenance and new features.

At the individual level, I think most people will be writing software, whether they realise it or not. Asking Claude to do something for you will often result in a purely generated script built for that one specific task. Some might even take it further, generating custom dashboards or whatever else they need to support their work.

At the company level though... most companies can hardly maintain opensource deployments, let alone write and maintain their own bespoke software. Pick any company that uses GitLab, they're probably a few major versions behind. It's across the board.

There's no doubt people will try to write more software.

But we've all seen how this plays out.

The smart engineer who built a weekend solution leaves, and nobody supports the software afterward. Coding agents certainly help, and only time will tell, but my bet is that for most organisations it will end up miserably.

It’s not about personal software it’s about how 1-3 people team will deliver a SaaS that actually works at scale for the 1/10th of the price.

In terms of personal software, he’s absolutely right, it’s great for hobbyist and things like in house tooling but that’s it.

My current guess about the future is that the age of SaaS is coming stronger than ever. I expect many vibe coders to come up with half-assed prototypes that will be copiously replicated and improved by more qualified devs aided by LLMs. In a similar way, I also expect smaller qualified teams (3 to 5) to leverage LLMs to become more relevant competitors of medium to large SaaS players. By 2029, we'll have more, but smaller SaaS companies.

Are any saas companies actually reducing their prices?

Like that logistics company owner, he doesn't want to fill in your crappy insurance form, he wants to call insurance broker and have an insurance.

Doesn't matter if you put AI in the form, make 10% discount, polish UX to finest levels. He just doesn't want to spend time on it.

I’m building an app and many things I’d normally pay for like metrics and emailing I can just do myself.

A friend has a law firm employing 100+ people and they are building so many internal tools they would otherwise be delaying or paying salesforce consultants for.

Bespoke sofware does exist. And yes, consultants small and large have built, deployed, and charged through the roof for bespoke software. And often it sucks. Here's why it sucks: because clients can't coherently describe what they need, don't have a budget, consultancies don't care and - critically - the person writing the spec (and controling the budget) isn't the same person that will use it. (here you also have "A Tragedy of EdTech" in one sentence, but that's a different post)

But there's another kind of bespoke software, which, for a lack of a better name, I'll unimaginatively call "internal tool". This is what VB6/Access/VBA/HyperCard enabled back in the day, what Retool tried to own recently, and what many Excel spreadsheets are secretly doing.

This is duct-taped-code-pasta that barely holds but does exactly what the business needs, and nothing more. I've seen and heard of many cases already of non-techies doing exactly that. It's not scalable, it's not maintainable, it doesn't follow best practices, it doesn't have tests or docs, but it doesn't matter, because it works and solves a biz problem.

The reason it works is that the person can iteratively narrow down to what they need, feedback is instant, iteration is minutes not days or weeks and is super cheap (compared to external developers).

No sane freelancer or agency would ship something like it - for many reasons: as a software engineer you want to ship quality product and charge appropriate amount of money. Many times, that's the right thing for the customers.

Often, it's overkill, and these types of smaller "quick win" projects never get started in the first place. And there's loads of potential projects like these!

So yeah, nobody will vibe-code a payroll system for 100+ person company, nor should they. But people absolutely will, and already do, whip up something that solves their niche problem. Now maybe they'll use AI instead of Excel.

Which makes me think there's a lot more room for "virtual people." Imagine a very smart AI bot that could hold multiple conversations at once and remember a lot of things.

> So when someone suggests that AI means everyone will build their own custom tools, ask who "everyone" is. The three-person accounting firm drowning in client paperwork? They want the paperwork gone, not a new system to maintain. The regional logistics company with 40 trucks? They want the routes optimized, not Joe spouting off about this new system he’s been messing around with. The law firm billing 70-hour weeks? They want leverage on their time, not a software project to design.

What if there was a bot that was just smart enough to figure those things out, without needing traditional "software"?

To me, that's more what AI is, instead of adding chatbots to everything, and vibecoding everything.

Self selecting biology gonna self select.

Ummmm, what? People love their smartphones, and do you know what those are?

Computers.