This article made no sense to me. It is talking about AI-generated code eating SaaS. That's not what is going to replace SaaS. When AI is able to do the job itself — without generating code — that's what is going to replace SaaS.
AI-generated code still requires software engineers to build, test, debug, deploy, secure, monitor, be on-call, handle incidents, and so on. That's very expensive. It is much cheaper to pay a small monthly fee to a SaaS company.
Note that there is zero actual sales/renewal data quoted in the article so this is all the authors vibes based on how he has been able to vibe code a few things for a team of one person to use
> AI-generated code still requires software engineers to build, test, debug, deploy, ensure security, monitor, be on-call, handle incidents, and so on. That's very expensive. It is much cheaper to pay a small monthly fee to a SaaS company.
Yeah it's a fundamental misunderstanding of economies of scale. If you build an in-house app that does X, you incur 100% of the maintenance costs. If you're subscribed to a SaaS product, you're paying for 1/N % of the maintenance costs, where N is the number of customers.
I only see AI-generated code replacing things that never made sense as a SaaS anyway. It's telling the author's only concrete example of a replaced SaaS product is Retool, which is much less about SaaS and much more about a product that's been fundamentally deprecated.
Wake me up when we see swaths of companies AI-coding internal Jira ("just an issue tracker") and Github Enterprise ("just a browser-based wrapper over git") clones.
"Wake me up when we see swaths of companies AI-coding internal Jira".
This shouldnt be the goal. The goal should be to build an AI that can tell you what is done and what needs to be done i.e. replace jira with natural interactions. An AI that can "see" and "understand" your project. An AI that can see it, understand it, build it and modify it. I know this is not happening for the next few decades or so.
> This shouldnt be the goal. The goal should be to build an AI that can tell you what is done and what needs to be done i.e. replace jira with natural interactions. An AI that can "see" and "understand" your project. An AI that can see it, understand it, build it and modify it.
The difference is that an AI-coded internal Jira clone is something that could realistically happen today. Vague notions of AI "understanding" anything are not currently realistic and won't be for an indeterminate amount of time, which could mean next year, 30 years from now, or never. I don't consider that worth discussing.
Analytics like what?! Sentry? See, i'm the first one to waste 15+ hours of my own time claude vibing some barely working analytics in order to save 15 dollars for not paying a proven solution to professionals who really understand that problem domain - but we all agree how dumb this is. But if i really can vibe code that analytics in 5 minutes, that thing was never a proven SaaS business in the first place and my use case with certainty a toy app with zero users..
The value proposition of SaaS is ultimately just that it's not a hack.
Most SaaS products could be replaced by a form + spreadsheet + email workflow, and the reason they aren't is that people don't want to be dealing with a hacky solution. Devs can hack together a nice little webapp instead of a network of spreadsheets, but it's still a hack. Factoring in AI assistance, perhaps SaaS is now competing with "something I hacked together in a week" as opposed to "something I hacked together in a month," but it's a hack either way.
I am absolutely going to pay for analytics and dashboards, because I don't want the operational concerns of my Elasticsearch analytics cluster getting in the way of the alarm that goes off when my primary database catches fire. Ops visibility is too important to be a hack, regardless of how quickly I could implement that hack.
How do you/I know that? I implemented OpenTelemetry in a project of mine recently and was shocked to see the number of AI authored commits in the git repository.
> So, I ask again - how do you know that the service you're paying for is all of those things?
How do you know anything? How do you know the bank won't lose your money? How do you know the bank note you hold is worth what it says? How do you know?
I'd love for SaaS to stay thriving but the flip side is simply the harsh reality that my own second thought these days is immediately "how easily will an agent replace my idea? yea probably quite easily..."
Ideas were never worth much. Implementing a quick prototype was always pretty simple. How easy is it, with modern tooling, to build a collaborative web editor? Just slap together prosemirror and automerge and you're already there. Still, nobody has displaced Google Docs.
The bit about building an internal app for eg marketing or sales is super fun. Getting calls starting at 8am EST because they then (reasonably!) expect it to work less so. Software still has an enormous ktlo tax and until that changes, I'm skeptical about the entire thesis.
Not to mention the author appears to run a 1-2 person company, so ... yeah. AI thought leadership ahoy.
AI-generated code still requires software engineers to build, test, debug, deploy, secure, monitor, be on-call, handle incidents, and so on. That's very expensive. It is much cheaper to pay a small monthly fee to a SaaS company.