zlacker

>>jnord+(OP)
I am the founder of a niche SaaS (https://partsbox.com/ — software for managing electronic parts inventory and production). While I am somewhat worried about AI capabilities, I'm not losing too much sleep over it.

The worry is that customers who do not realize the full depth of the problem will implement their own app using AI. But that happens today, too: people use spreadsheets to manage their electronic parts (please don't) and BOMs (bills of materials). The spreadsheet is my biggest competitor.

I've been designing and building the software for 10 years now and most of the difficulty and complexity is not in the code. Coding is the last part, and the easiest one. The real value is in understanding the world (the processes involved) and modeling it in a way that cuts a good compromise between ease of use and complexity.

Sadly, as I found out, once you spend a lot of time thinking and come up with a model, copycats will clone that (as well as they can, but superficially it will look similar).

>>jwr+rQ
Not specific to PartsBox, but we use Inventree (open source similar to PartsBox) and self host it. Over the past few months we noticed certain pain points in our workflow. Rather than looking for a new tool, we used Claude Code to write some backend services and some frontend modifications. Took 2 days of tinkering. Has easily saved that much time since we implemented it.

While rolling the whole solution with an AI agent is not practical, taking a open source starting point and using AI to overcome specific workflow pain points as well as add features allows me to have a lower cost, specifically tailored solution to our needs.

>>dismal+Hf1
First, I'll second that I've applied agentic LLMs to an open source project to fix bugs and forcibly coerce it to act in ways that the maintainer may or may not approve of. It has been remarkablely effective, so long as I'm willing to apply patches or maintain a fork of the project (trivial, since this particular open-source project is abandoned anyway).

That said, the act of doing this- using LLMs to dominate somebody's legitimately intelligent and unique work- feels not only discourteous, but worse, like it's a short-term solution.

I'm convinced that it's a short-term solution NOT because I don't think that LLMs can continuously maintain these projects, but because open-source itself is going to be clawed back. The raison d'être of open-source is personal pride, hiring, collaboration, enjoyment, trust, etc. These motivations make less sense in an LLM-fueled world.

My prediction is that useful and well maintained open-source projects like we're hijacking will become fewer and far between.