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
It's a bit surprising to me that Microsoft hasn't created a product that's "you have an Excel file in one of our cloud storage systems, here's a way for you to vibe code and host a web app whose storage is backed entirely by that file, where access control is synced to that file's access, and real-time updates propagate in both directions as if someone were editing it in native Excel on another computer. And you can eject a codebase that you, as the domain expert, can hand to a tech team to build something more broadly applicable for your organization."

Nowhere near the level of complexity that would enter your threat model. But this would be the first, minimal step towards customers building their own tools, and the fact that not even this workflow has entered the zeitgeist is... well, it's not the best news for some of the most bullish projections of AI adoption in businesses large and small.

>>btown+lr2
You can use something like Salesforce as an app platform if you want. It lets you create "Custom Objects", which are basically tables, write queries, and so on.

It's just that the hassle of dealing with that platform tends to be similar to the hassle of setting up an app yourself, and now you're paying a per-user license cost.

>>nitwit+Mb3
Even Salesforce doesn't have a good way to quickly port an Excel-based workflow, with file handoffs and backwards compatibility, into Salesforce. In theory, you could have an LLM generate all the metadata files that would execute a relevant schema migration, generate the interface XML, and build the right kinds of API calls and webhooks... but understanding what it's doing requires a Ph.D. in Salesforce, and many don't have time for that.