This is because what management wants and what builders want are not aligned, not because the quality of JIRA is so amazing that no other alternative could ever be created. JIRA is fine but many people I know that use have some qualms with it because the bloat is pretty crazy.
As Spolsky said a quarter century ago, "bloat" is just "bugs somebody already fixed". (He may have actually said that about "cruft", but the idea still applies.)
We are certainly closer now to being able to prototype and go to market faster with a product. In one weekend is a little much but I think its hard to deny that building will continue to expedite. What most developers don't think about is that the marketing, sales, customer service are all non-trivial parts of the business/product and all require legwork that is more than just sitting at an IDE. The nail in the coffin is that the data is a large part of company moats, and new products need time in the market to get that. Migration is also a long process and risky...so to get customers, a newcomer needs to provide way more value than what the incumbent gives.
I imagine you're going to have people trying to automate the whole GTM lifecycle, but eventually the developer that thinks they can bootstrap a one man enterprise without actually doing any kind of social interaction will run into a wall.
The "service" part can still come from internal sources. Plenty of companies have internal support for internal tooling. With a good foundation of infrastructure and a lean team that knows how to build, not just vibe code, there is most definitely some ROI there.
But yes, this brings us back to the point that simply building the tool is only a small part of the process...and it has often been one of the most expensive parts of the process.
I think that just because anyone can do it, doesn't mean they will. Lots of people have really great ideas but very few actually commit to execution. Ultimately ROI will go down, deincentivizing the commercialization of that thing someone wanted to bang out in a weekend.
In the very long term, software will become a commodity, as you mentioned. Process and workflow may move into JIT delivery for the need at hand, in theory the data layer will be comprehensive and clean and the days of clicking around a bunch of stuff to fulfill process needs will move into a lower latency activity like...talking to your agent.
I saw a quote today by Brian Eno(1995) that said: "So the question becomes not whether you can do it or not, because any drudge can do it if they're prepared to sit in front of the computer for a few days; the question then is: of all the things you can now do, which do you choose to do?" and it resonated with me a lot.
> Lots of people have really great ideas but very few actually commit to execution.
This is true when you had to work hard for those ideas. Now you have LLMs. It means more people can sling a lot more crap at walls with fewer barriers to entry.
No, and I agree with the conservative sentiments here. However, putting together a SaaS alternative that frees up money during a crunch, and now with the pet features your boss has always wanted, is potent indeed.
You've hit the nail on the head. Immediate gratification.
AI is like sugar. It tastes nice, gives you energy quickly - what's not to like?
The gratification is immediate, and if "today is all that matters" it's brilliant.
The problem with sugar (and AI) is medium term. So sure, that junior dev whipped up the whole framework in ClaudeCode, and it's humming nicely. Junior dev gets credit, and after a couple years moves on somewhere else.
Then something changes. Windows. TLS. Code Signing, whatever. We need to update the program to the change. Just a small tweak. Junior Dev has gone (or is otherwise occupied) so we'll get new-Junior-dev to do it. Is he expected to do the change at the code level? Or at the prompt level? Will ClaudeCode in 2029 be able to maintain ClaudeCode Code from 2026? Or will it want to rewrite everything? Will new-junior-dev have the skillset to prompt as well as first-junior-dev? Was the code good enough that a dev could just "take it over"? Or was it "it works, let's use it" standard?
AI makes everyone look good in the short term. But it worries me for what happens in 5 years, 10 years, and so on.
Sugar is great, but you can't live (long term) on sugar. Sometimes you need a proper meal plan.
I think my point is that not everyone is suddenly going to go and start making stuff. There will definitely be an increase, which is a net positive because we can start exploring unknown areas of interest more rapidly, we can fail faster, etc. Fewer barriers to entry will increase competition, lower prices, increase efficiency, and theoretically benefit the consumer.
okay, what was the actual obstacle? it's really simple: in order to use something FREE, you had to touch GITHUB, which meant GIT. and people hate git.
today, with LLMs:
- "can i do this for free?"
- LLM dutifully does the needful, using projects it finds and code it learned from github, and doing the prosaic tasks of launching them for you, whatever that means.
people are getting way up into their heads about what matters, psychosocial and management and whatever bs. chatgpt is FREE. it will fix your problems for FREE. people will put up with ANYTHING for FREE.
the real innovation is laundering all that inaccessible, pre-existing solution space into a format that doesn't require transiting git and giving it away for free.
don't believe me? all of the most profitable SaaS businesses in technology are the packaging, deployment and customization of pre-existing open source free software, whether it is linux, kvm, postgres, etc. they are factories to turn stuff that is inaccessible because it is in GIT, which SUCKS - that is the hard part for people to wrap their minds around, that GIT sucks - into websites you can pay for. now LLMs do that.
Exactly. Once the market tastes like lemonade, everyone will be afraid of trying new apps in the way that they are afraid to accept phone calls from unknown numbers now.
You will trade initial development budget for advertising budget, trying to position your product in proximity with people who are known quantities.
Tbh I think you’re fundamentally misunderstanding the issue (or I am).
It’s not about some single dude disrupting the saas market. It’s about largish companies who already have internal dev teams, slowly weening their company off these ginormous one size fits all saas products and building local, tailored solutions.
It’s death by a thousand cuts from the erosion of their highest paying customers.
I feel the market forces kinda point the other way, though, since the customization of the SaaS is also cheapening, but faster and more targeted than these internal teams. Over time I believe that’ll lead to more, not less, SaaS consolidation.
Let’s put the cost of code production at 0: regulatory compliance with payment processing laws or industry oversight is a recurring job that’s common for the whole industry when it changes. SaaS companies have hundreds of customers to attend, these become first class business functions. New demands won’t be in training data for LLMs, so someone needs to be doing this. SaaS has the funds and customer base to have dedicated experts at these functions, but it’s dead capital and nigh-impossible hiring in a tiny talent pool for the rest of the market… the delta to get Salesforce or SharePoint not to be total ass and fully customized is orders of magnitude smaller than detailing those foundations, and as people who sharecrop on platforms like those know, the devil is always in the details. Those internal teams just aren’t positioned to juggle both sides of that coin, they can’t be experts, mistakes can be existential, and the liability picture is so very ugly… coding is the least of it.
Into this, MBAs are not static. It’s not gonna take more than a few “vibe coding ate our CRM data” high profile snafus, or industry think pieces to map out why customization is faster/better/smarter, to get clear business dogma around this. A witty turn of phrase about focusing on your actual business.
I think ‘no one ever got fired for hiring IBM’ x 5 is on the horizon, and the evil marketers at Salesforce, MS, and the rest are gonna work hard to grow their piece of the pie. They have LLMs too, only with better models and unlimited tokens. And our executives will be checking directly with their LLMs about how to invest (the consultants, journalists, fanboys, and social media bots too…).
The history of software has been that once it becomes cheap enough for teams to flood the market with “existing product” + x feature for y users. The market consolidates around a leader who does all features for all customers.
I’d bet that we skip SaaS entirely and go to Anthropic directly. This means the ai has to understand that there are different users with conflicting requirements and that we all need the same exact copy of the burn rate report.
That might turn out to be less than reliable over time, as bots are already screwing up systems with fake information and it's probably going to get worse.
I don't disagree with that, but the market for lemons still doesn't really fit.
If I remember my econ class correctly it uses used cars as an example. If you're neighbor bought a used Toyota and tells you about it being a great purchase, you can't go out and buy another used Toyota and expect it to also be in great condition. Every car is a gamble.
But if you use something like Hubspot and tell your neighbor it's really good/bad you can expect to receive the same Hubspot service they did.
If you can gin these things up in a weekend then why would you bother with a monthly subscription model for software? The only valuable part is the specification and possibly the hardware to run it. If I were a CTO trying to save money I might pay for the labor to develop good specs, but I would prioritize getting out from under software companies with a rent seeking models and 80 to 90% margins
Even if AI were erased today, most SaaS companies wouldn’t exist in 5-10 years. Doing business with a small tech company that could run out of borrowed money or sell to someone who will destroy the product or just arbitrarily change the terms of service tomorrow is a liability. That’s assuming the hypothetical tech spend isn’t just eroding margin anyway.
it depends a lot on the application, I think, though certainly you can point to cloud services like Cloudflare or whatever Burger King was using to track how many times a clerk said "You Rule" (while capturing all customer audio data, which was then stolen by low-effort attackers) as high-risk; just because you don't feel the safety risks of outsourcing data to a black box on the cloud doesn't mean they don't exist, it just means you get to neglect them. when I headed IT at an SMB, I was given a lot of leeway, and our department had its own budget, so cutting out SaaS was a high priority so we could do more. if I were heading today with LLMs' present competency, I would have replaced much more, up to and including Salesforce which was draining the heck out of our budget despite us not doing anything technically interesting with it.
$40/head/year (including employees no longer with company) for a call metrics suite is low-stakes and relatively easy to replace what we want out of it, and this is an example of something we did replace with a $0 solution with my own abysmal-at-the-time coding skills. ~nobody's about to replace Microsoft suite, though (a couple replacements before me, they earnestly tried; there were still some laptops with OpenOffice on it; I admire them, but I'm not dealing with our sales team trying to figure out what an ODF is).
I love this "petty kingdom" budget model, by the way, as someone whose work personality could be described as "cheap analyst." I'm paying $40/month per head for Software X in your department, and I have an inferior replacement for $0/month/head which meets specs and which you can't quantify productivity loss for (essentially, it just looks ugly and feels bad). I can therefor cut that out of my budget entirely while meeting my obligations, and if *you* really want the decadent solution, *your* department can bear that cost. Either way, I get plenty more money to basically not have to be a dick (like charging careless employees for broken/stolen equipment, or getting an above-expectations solution for ADA employees); and sometimes, maybe some antennas show up on the roof which would be difficult to justify cost for if asked, but I'm way under-budget so nobody would.
On prudent choices: one thing I'm surprised about is that LLMs are showing me libraries and tools that I'd not found via search.
A boring one from today was about select, datalist or some custome element (which LLM can prototype) or some JS libs. Good breakdown; links to playgrounds, rough mocks so team could kick tires. It raises points the team had and had counterpoint to help drive decisions.
in the 90-ies anyone could easily prototype with tools like Access (and all the other "4GL" tools which were similarly all the rage back then). That still didn't preclude companies from buying their major software from software vendors instead of doing it themselves.
In some sense having customer able to prototype what they want is a good thing. I did it myself as i was at the time on that side, and having a quick-whip-it tool was a good thing to quickly get some feature that was missing in the major software before that major software would add it (if at all).
(And if one remembers for example Crystal Reports - while for "reports", it and the likes were in many senses such quick-whip-it tools for a lot of such customization that was doable by the customer.)
So, after initial aftershock - "Ahhhh, we don't need software companies anymore!" - we'll get to the state with software companies still doing their thing just with a lot of AI as specialization is one of the main thing in modern economy and AI becomes most powerful tools of the trade. (and various AI components themselves will be part of software delivery, like say a very fine-tuned model (hosted or on-premise) specific to the customer and software - Clippy on steroids)
(Of course some companies wouldn't survive the transition just like some companies didn't survive the transitions to client/server, cloud, etc. while some new companies will emerge like Anthropic has today or Borland had at the time)
Access is not as dead as you might hope. The long tail of internal tools written with Access continues to shamble along. I had to figure out how to dump MDB files on Windows last year for just this reason. As an industry I think we often fail to grasp how much outsider art there is, in the form of internal departmental tools.
LLM coding is going to create a cambrian explosion of these tools. It’s going to be very interesting to see the remnants of this wave 30 years down the line.
One of the key questions here - will LLM coding decrease the proliferation of app-specific Excel files (by for example accelerating and simplifying Excel-to-webapp conversion) or would result in an opposite outcome by making feasible managing even orders of magnitude more of those disparate Excel files :)
I wouldn’t bet against cramming more and more business processes into Excel. The guy who was copying cells from one workbook to another yesterday, tomorrow can have a single mega-workbook with all the macros more or less deconflicted.
It means the same: random lottery of mass, with everuone else failing.
American capitalism hides the depressing fact that rarely does the best succees.
AAI momentum is parallel to just buying lottery tickets and doing so with the belief that you know the real odds, so one can overwhelm with quantity of tickets.
I sure hope I never have to hunt down any GTM options myself soon and I can tell the AI to do what it should be doing. However AI adoption may be getting slowed down by profit motives because what Google should have already been doing is letting me git clone the entirety of GTM with all its configs to a local folder so I can treat it like code because it is code. The difficulty with AI adoption will be to make all products be like this so they can interact on a code level instead of me having to press buttons in different UIs to make thing shappen. E.g cloudflare should be letting me git clone its entire config, everything I did in the dashboard, to my folder too.
There's a difference between someone breaking into your house to steal your valuables, and you getting robbed after leaving your valuables on your lawn with a sign saying "Look At My Valuables"
Startups of the last decade were routinely doing this. Building their fresh ideas on the newfangled databse without bothering to investigste how to secure it in any way against malicious actors.
You build a Twitter. Profiles have posts, posts can have images, etc. It's very easy to model the database.
But then how do you make money with it? Now you need to build a separate system for advertising? Or do you want to sell subscriptions? Which means you need to build a separate system to handle payments. This is usually the big one, because when you handle money, what happens if there is a bug and you charge someone without delivering anything? How do you prevent fraud? How do you handle disputes?
Someone posted something illegal. What do you do in this situation? Do you call the police? The FBI? What kind of data do you give the authorities? How much data SHOULD you have been logging in the first place in case something like this happens?
One user doesn't like you so he bought a botnet to DDoS your website. How do you handle this? Are they mass posting? Mass creating accounts? Is it possible for them to exhaust all the usernames possible and then nobody can create an account anymore?
Your website is online but if the server blows up you'll lose all the data in the database. You need backups. You need a system to ensure the backups are actually working. But then some guy from the UK said he wants his posts all deleted. What are you going to do now, because his posts are also in the backups, and you don't want to touch those.
Trolls are posting things against the ToS. Who handles these things? Shadowban? So there needs to be a shadowban system? Moderators? So there needs to be a moderator-only section of the website? Should this be integrated with the main website or not?
Then you look at this horrendous mess of 6 paragraphs and you think back about the first paragraph that already did everything you wanted from Twitter. All these other systems, most of the work, and all you actually wanted was the first paragraph.
Startups have no users and no data to start with, and if they fuck up security, well, they just fail sooner than expected.
Once you get past a certain size, you have very different sorts of problems. Any idiot can vibe code a facebook lookalike, but the real one has to handle hundreds of millions of users and posts while being a target for state actors.
I find myself building fun tools for myself and things that help with quality of life slightly, but I don’t need all this extra enterprise stuff for that. I actually find myself more likely to use something I built because I am proud of it, even if there is already something on the market that addresses my need.
The problem is that "good" companies cannot succeed in a landscape filled with morally bad ones, when you are in a time of low morality being rewarded. Competing in a rigged market by trying to be 100% morally and ethically right ends up in not competing at all. So companies have to pick and choose the hills they fight on. If you take a look at how people are voting with their dollars by paying for these tools...being a "good" company doesn't seem to factor much into it on aggregate.
exactly. you cant compete morally when cheating, doing illegal things and supporting bad guys are norm. Hence, I hope open models will win in the long term.
Similar to Oracle vs Postgres, or some closed source obscure caching vs Redis. One day I hope we will have very good SOTA open models where closed models compete to catch up (not saying Oracle is playing a catch up with Pg).
Laughter is a decent signal, but it can be noise if the audience is uncomfortable or trying to please. Does the joke teller count as being part of the audience? I imagine if someone is telling the joke...they must think it is funny, so in most cases at least 1 participant thinks its funny. Sometimes jokes are unintended, maybe a faux pas, and it might be inappropriate for someone to laugh...does it make it not a joke, or does it make it not funny if I cannot laugh?
Lots of layers to this, but I guess the old adage "it depends" is very fitting here!
About as useful as telling a heroine addict to get off heroine, except that screen addiction is much more subtle in the harmful effects, but is incredibly corrosive over time. Almost all tech products in the world are pushing for more and more screentime, there is really not much regulation in sight, in the US at least(go Australia!). The best hope is that one day an Ozempic for screen time comes out!
Sure, I would agree my comment was hyperbolic. If the consensus on "phone use bad" is still shaky, wouldn't telling someone to get off their phone actually be less useful, because there would be more skepticism over the harm being done?
Screen "addiction" isn't a real thing. Addiction is a specific medical phenomenon, not just any bad habit. Go find me a study in a medical journal that quantifies the physiological effects of smartphone withdrawal.
I do think people spend too much time on social media, but it's not helpful to frame this by analogy to something it simply is not. Bad habits are bad in their own right. We don't need to appropriate medical language to discuss them, and doing so is misleading. You can actually just stop using Instagram Reels. It's nothing like heroin. It's a bad habit, and you can just turn it off.
"In contrast[to drug withdrawal], smartphone dependence is driven by digital stimuli and psychological-behavioral mechanisms, with almost no physical dependence; withdrawal mainly causes psychological discomfort (such as restlessness) without severe physical reactions. Its health risks are mostly indirect (like vision loss, sleep disorders), and withdrawal can generally be improved through behavioral adjustments."
I can find you 10 more but I doubt it would change your outlook.
This is a study finding that physiological smartphone withdrawal doesn't exist. Smartphone dependence is merely "psychological-behavioural," and you can develop a psychologically dependent relationship with anything. Being dependant on your girlfriend doesn't make you "addicted" to her. Please, find 10 more studies—this is making my point for me.
Again, I'm not saying our relationship with smartphones is healthy. I'm saying addiction is a specific thing, and this isn't it. Getting strung out on heroin is not anything like using your phone too much.
Thanks for proving my point! Insomnia and sleep deprivation are highly dependent on both psychological and physiological factors. You want studies for that too? Every addiction stems from some combination of psychology and biology because the the brain factors into everything we do, consciously or sub-consciously. What about addiction to porn, not a real thing I guess?
This is just "buy low, sell high" but automated. It is no different than what many humans do every single day, just at a much faster clip and with better processing power. Used car dealerships are a great example. If you think its dumb that humans try to find price mismatches in order to make money...well you may hate the idea of capitalism, which is probably a fair take.
> Its baffling that you think the collapse of the USD would have no negative ramifications on the rest of the world.
Empires rise and fall, pax Americana was not the world's first hegemony. The end of the British Empire is within living memory - while they sowed seeds of instability in a handful of former colonies that still flare up today, the rest of the world is fine. Britain, on the other hand, has had to enter a "managed decline", and is a much smaller player in world politics than it was a century ago.
What do you think the US is going to do for that bang? How could a bang ever bring the wealth and peace that its prior friendship with allies brought?
The US doesn't have the cards to play, because the current US Government doesn't even understand where the wealth has come from. That US Government has risen to power by tricking the public into thinking that the very things that make the US wealthy and powerful are actually a scam making them poorer.
The current US Government has already broken the trust that makes the US strong. The repercussions will take years to become fully visible, and without immediate course correction those future repercussions will get far far worse.
> What do you think the US is going to do for that bang?
Literally a bang.
Or many bangs. The largest military in human history going YOLO won’t be a pretty sight. (The only way it sucks more in America than it does abroad is if we go civil war. But even then, it’s almost certain to go global.)
This may be recency bias. The current age just has more immediate, global communications. "The sun never sets on the British empire" had a literal meaning based on how globalized it was then. They even laid intercontinental undersea cables.
The negative ramifications seem to be better than being invaded by the US or having regional entities invaded by the US, and the ensuing instability as a result.
If its going to be like this the rest of the world might as well cut its losses
You seem to have a very limited view of the world if you think the US doesn't have fans of totalitarian rule and that the "rest of the world" is exclusively against US global strategy. I am going to guess that you actually have no idea what the negative ramifications of the collapse of a currency that underpins the foundations of our world are, because it is something that is near impossible to predict.
I agree that at some point, governments and people will need to step up and fight back, but the idea that the US will somehow fall in a vacuum and everyone else will live happily ever after is laughable.
IT will be painful, but we (the rest of the world) will weather the storm, and come out to a brighter and cleaner world. The greatest con the US pulled was to scare the rest of the world of being bullied by powerful fascist nations whilst becoming the most powerful fascist bully.
Yes but you have a) no idea how bad the suck will be b) no idea how long the suck will last and c) what the "better" will look like.
I am not advocating that the status quo should go on, I am just saying that the repercussions will be vast and long lasting, likely resulting in a world war, and whatever follows after that(if anything).
The US isn't going to get hyperinflation. It's going to get a Japan style heat death. More and more wealth concentrated into low yielding debt, rather than invested into growth, while purchasing power is chewed up by persistent currency debasement. Japan never did suffer real deflation (that was a lie), it suffered massive inflation: they debased the Yen to garbage levels, drastically chopping down the standard of living of the typical Japanese person, wiping out their wealth, eroding the value of their output per capita. Only in a twisted, failed Keynesian experiment could one confuse such epic scale inflation with deflation. What they thought was deflation was an economic heat death due to their productive capital being tied up in low yield debt.
Have you been to Japan? Salaries are low, but stuff is crazy cheap (even after the past year of inflation). People are still feeling whiplash from the fact that prices can change at all. Many menus and items have prices that have barely changed since the early 1990s, and most of those changes were to add sales taxes to the menu.
The exchange rate of the yen has dropped recently by a lot, but the inflation experience there has been the exact opposite of America's.
“There's no chance US will default on its debts, all it has to do is to print more money.”
Trying to inflate away 40+ Trillion in debt would directly result in hyperinflation.
> they debased the Yen to garbage levels
Look at Yen to USD exchange rates and it’s clear they didn’t. “From 1991 to 2003, the Japanese economy, as measured by GDP, grew only 1.14% annually, while the average real growth rate between 2000 and 2010 was about 1%,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decades Meanwhile the USD exchange rate in Jan 1988 was 127 vs 140 in 1998 vs 107 in 2008. It went up and down all through the 20 years of poor economic growth, but something else was clearly the issue.
It did not go into a hyperinflation after the WW2, when the US debt load as a share of GDP was even higher than today; and deflated in the same way US is likely to do it now (bond rates forced way below inflation with yield control).
I am not saying that the process will be pleasant for the US or its citizens. But it is not without precedent and is extremely unlikely to cause hyperinflation. My 2c.
The big time suck I see with robotic anything is that simulation for training will only take it so far...eventually it needs to be in the real world, making mistakes, and this comes with far more red tape and much higher risk, slowing down the process. I don't see hardware as the bottleneck, its software and hardware working together in an environment where the stakes are much higher than just in the lab.
reply