zlacker

>>jnord+(OP)
I'm CTO at a vertical SaaS company, paired with a product-focused CEO with deep domain expertise. The thesis doesn't match my experience.

For one thing, the threat model assumes customers can build their own tools. Our end users can't. Their current "system" is Excel. The big enterprises that employ them have thousands of devs, but two of them explicitly cloned our product and tried to poach their own users onto it. One gave up. The other's users tell us it's crap. We've lost zero paying subscribers to free internal alternatives.

I believe that agents are a multiplier on existing velocity, not an equalizer. We use agents heavily and ship faster than ever. We get a lot of feedback from users as to what the internal tech teams are shipping and based on this there's little evidence of any increase in velocity from them.

The bottleneck is still knowing what to build, not building. A lot of the value in our product is in decisions users don't even know we made for them. Domain expertise + tight feedback loop with users can't be replicated by an internal developer in an afternoon.

>>benzib+xN
> For one thing, the threat model assumes customers can build their own tools.

That's not the threat model. The threat model is that they won't have to - at some point which may not be right now. End users want to get their work done, not learn UIs and new products. If they can get their analysis/reports based on excels which are already on SharePoint (or wherever), they'd want just that. You can already see this happening.

>>jeswin+3Y
The president of a company I work with is a youngish guy who has no technical skills, but is resourceful. He wanted updated analytic dashboards, but there’s no dev capacity for that right now. So he decided he was going to try his hand at building his own dashboard using Lovable, which is one of these AI app making outfits. I sent him a copy of the dev database and a few markdown files with explanations regarding certain trickier elements of the data structure and told him to give them to the AI, it will know what they mean. No updates yet, but I have every confidence he’ll figure it out.

Think about all the cycles this will save. The CEO codes his own dashboards. The OP has a point.

>>adrian+Zk1
At a certain scale the CEO's time is likely better spent dictating the dashboard they want rather than implementing it themselves. But I guess to your point, the future may allow for the dictation to be the creation.

>>hrimfa+5y1
Agree, as engineers we should be making the car easier to operate instead of making everyone a mechanic.

Focus on the simple iteration loop of "why is it so hard to understand things about our product?" maybe you cant fix it all today but climb that hill more instead of make your CEO spend some sleepless nights on a thing that you could probably build in 1/10th the time.

If you want to be a successful startup saas sw eng then engaging with the current and common business cases and being able to predict the standard cache of problems they're going to want solved turns you from "a guy" to "the guy".