zlacker

>>peteth+(OP)
> The fear is that these [AI] tools are allowing companies to create much of the software they need themselves.

AI-generated code still requires software engineers to build, test, debug, deploy, secure, monitor, be on-call, support, handle incidents, and so on. That's very expensive. It is much cheaper to pay a small monthly fee to a SaaS company.

>>latefo+G02
Bespoke software development is a huge market. It is incredibly expensive. AI coding agents are not perfect, but just usable enough to be coached through by a semi-IT-literate business person to write some scripts or a little crud site that's needed for a specific LOB task (typically a 30k-250k range project)

The alternatives before were propose the case to IT, and if lucky it gets put on the planning, outsourced to consultants, and delivered 18 months from now for an astronomical investment in both time and cost. Or go at it yourself with Excell and VBA.

The AI thing will be a just 'good enough' barely working clutch of ugly code. Then again, so was most of the consultant produced code.

>>PeterS+9L4
This exactly. How many small businesses were running some sort of Access database built by someone who knew just enough to meet their business process needs? "Brenda always orders these parts on Tuesday so make sure there is a Tuesday ordering table." Eventually some SaaS solution came in and they evolved their business process because of the proposed benefits. I expect we are going to see a resurgence of good enough software created for the real world hodgepodge of business practices. Not a bad thing in the short term as it will creating adequate efficiency, but long term we are going to reap the technical debt. My prediction is that the next SaaS evolution is going to be platforms for these random solutions. Just as Salesforce captured CMS market, someone is going to capture the AI agent market where users can write and host their LOB code agnostic to the rest of their infrastructure stack and 'slightly' reduce that technical debt.