Thread

Every SaaS business will become a harness around a model

164 points · 109 comments · iacguy

hollowturtle · 1790978701 · focus · HN ↗
Who ever wrote this it seems it never built any serious software. Software factories don’t exist and you will put yourself in a corner in a dangerous position
1. sshh12 · 1790978828 · focus · HN ↗
  yes very unserious software: <a href="https://abnormal.ai/" rel="nofollow">https://abnormal.ai/
  1. rdevilla · 1790978964 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
  2. hollowturtle · 1790979075 · focus · HN ↗
    So abnormal is a harness? Website looks just like millions others
    redanddead · 1790979496 · focus · HN ↗
    I had rented an office in the same building as them a few years back. Funny enough and unrelatedly, their VCs invited me for a meet at one point, so I researched their portcos and abnormal is one of them.
    Their main thing, iirc, was detecting ~abnormal~ looking emails. It's the main way companies lose money and IP, it's not via crazy hacks, it's obviously the human element that is the biggest vulnerability in all companies. A stressed employee gets an email saying hey i'm the ceo i'm in a rush, or hey it's totally jennifer from your team i'm stuck outside, send me all the files/do x quickly. I don't have any fucking idea what they're doing now and I bet you they dont either
    This must be a response to the cyber stuff from the big labs
  3. [deleted] · 1790979389 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
2. theturtletalks · 1790979807 · focus · HN ↗
  I’ve built a software factory and am using it to build an open-source alternative to every SaaS. What do you mean it’s not possible? A harness like Pi can be turned into a software factory with the right spec, extensions, skills, and a cron.
  1. hollowturtle · 1791033185 · focus · HN ↗
    I opened <a href="https://marketplace.openship.org" rel="nofollow">https://marketplace.openship.org and tried the "find me a t shirt" example prompt, added one to cart, i clicked once and it was not working, so i clicked a second time and it added two of them, so i realized every interaction was super slow. Congratulations for your slop automated platform, and good luck having customers
    hollowturtle · 1791033572 · focus · HN ↗
    Holy moly every UI interaction on the cart is getting half a second to more than a second -.-'. Selecting a radio option freezes the ui for 0.5s. This is more than a vibe coded app
    theturtletalks · 1791053190 · focus · HN ↗
    You do realize the marketplace is just a thin client over the stores? So yes you interacting with the marketplace hits the stores API. And the stores are demos that are in 1 region (US East). If you are not in the US, latency will be high. For production stores, CDNs will fix this issue.
    Just went thru the full check out in incognito mode and it works for me.
    habinero · 1791071139 · focus · HN ↗
    If it chugs that badly with one user and zero load, I'm gonna assume it'll tip over if I so much as look at it funny.
    SaaS is not the website itself. It's paying for risk management. For example, why did you use AWS instead of the wayyyy cheaper server-under-a-desk? At your scale, I bet it would be more than adequate.
    If _you_ don't want to self-host something core to your business, think about why. Congrats, you now understand why people pay for SaaS.
    theturtletalks · 1791075126 · focus · HN ↗
    Did you try it for yourself? The reason it's a bit finicky is that a lot of the actions in the chat skip the AI altogether, such as changing the cart values or changing the shipping options. In many other agentic commerce chat interfaces, every single action just involves sending a message in the chat. And then the AI calls the MCP action. But we thought, why not let some actions use the MCP tool directly? But this adds latency because you're interacting with the store's GraphQL API directly.
    It’s still working for me and snappy but I’m in the region it’s hosted it. It’s also hosted on Railway so not sure where you got AWS from.
    habinero · 1791153683 · focus · HN ↗
    You don't gotta justify yourself. I don't really care why it's slow nor why you made the choices you made. And that's the point I was making: _neither will anyone else_. "It works on my machine" doesn't cut it when people are trying to determine if your stuff is worth the monumental risk.
    I saw us-east and assumed it was us-east-1 but it doesn't matter. The same criticism applies to any hosting situation. You _could_ have gone with a cheaper DIY solution but didn't.
    theturtletalks · 1791053280 · focus · HN ↗
    Also the software factory is actually making the B2B SaaS for me. The marketplace will interface with them so that comes a bit later. To judge the quality of the software factory, you can ask Claude to look at our Openfronts on GitHub, primarily the e-commerce and restaurant ones.
3. Fordec · 1790980219 · focus · HN ↗
  Judging by comment history, this new month old account of yours is just for dunking on AI development isn't it?
  Software factories don't exist is an easily falsifiable statement <a href="https://github.com/topics/software-factory" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/topics/software-factory
  1. hollowturtle · 1791010607 · focus · HN ↗
    New month old what? And btw software factories are just snake oil

Open on Hacker News to reply ↗

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.