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.
Prototype maybe. Go to market maybe not so. It's giving false hope. You're just taking more shortcuts with prototyping.
Even if you can build it in a day B2B SaaS will continue to prosper because they sell peace of mind, reliability and compliance. Not features.
Also due to economy of scale it will always be cheaper to buy something from a vendor that sells it to many clients than to DIY it.
What are the higher-order effects when anyone can do this, and *aaS becomes a market for Lemons?
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.
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)
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.
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.
What actually happens in a startup is you encounter these problems one at a time as they arise.
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.
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.
- nearly every enterprise IT project is a failure anyway
- "can i do this for free?" savvy people write "thing i don't want to pay for github".
- ??? "stupid smelly nerds!" (https://www.reddit.com/r/github/comments/1at9br4)
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.
A CTOs job isn't to save money but to spend money effectively. Saving money by increasing risk is not neccesarily a prudent move.
But you are not limited to only using LLM for coding.
I agree that marketing and sales is as important as product and technology, but they are not necessarily safe.
Use stripe, cloudflare, whatever the legal equivalent of these stuff, S3.
Yes they might take most potential profit, but you'll also not have a huge payroll.
Absolutely. But this begs the question that businesses want to also sign up to maintain whatever product they've built, on top of their core business.
"Service" is the word that people seem to be forgetting in SaaS. If you roll you own, all you have is software.
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.
You will trade initial development budget for advertising budget, trying to position your product in proximity with people who are known quantities.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.