Thread

Every SaaS business will become a harness around a model

164 points · 109 comments · iacguy

reticulates · 1790981347 · focus · HN ↗
An uninspired vision of the future. We have endless evidence through history that hiring the most engineers, producing the most output, raising the most money is not the path to success. The most successful businesses are those that deeply understand something about their customers, about how to sell to their buyers. The most has never mattered. An army of agents doing endless busywork is not the path to success.
Google isn’t successful because it has the best engineers, it has the best engineers because it is successful. Google is an extremely boring business: show adverts to make money. And they made so much money. The next Google is not going to be the company with the best “harness” it’ll be the company that has an obscenely profitable product.
Founder mode, what was considered a panacea just 12 months ago, is defined by a founder giving a shit about everything. You don’t succeed by handing everything off to an army of ~agents~ consultants.
This vision of the future is nonsense that will not pan out. You can add that to the HN AI predictions. At no point will real businesses be “harnesses” around AI models.
1. wg0 · 1790981742 · focus · HN ↗
  My company can vibe code whole JIRA in two weeks even on a $200 plan and then they can stop paying the JIRA tax forever.
  That's true for any product.
  Who are they going to sell the product that this whole harness would produce? Any ideas?
  1. [deleted] · 1790981953 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
  2. reticulates · 1790982117 · focus · HN ↗
    We have evidence that this is not true. For years and years you have been able to self-host Zulip and Mattermost but companies still pay Slack millions of dollars per year. GitHub has billions in revenue, why not just use Gitea for free? So on and so forth. The ability to generate a (shitty) clone of software does not magically make the cloned software less valuable. Paying for software isn’t a “tax” when it produces value. If this vision of the future was true, cheap/free alternatives would have already destroyed the SaaS market years and years ago.
    wg0 · 1790982410 · focus · HN ↗
    You'd agree that:
    1. The quality of Mattermost and Zulip was NOT exactly as polished as Slack.
    2. Deployment of such stacks was a problem. A complicate operational overhead.
    These days, that's no more the case. Agents can:
    1. Make pixel perfect clone of Slack or Jira with SQLite or ejabberd behind.
    2. Or they can deploy the Zulip or Mattermost or GitLab for you just give them an SSH key to the machine and see them bringing the stack to life.
    So now and back then are not the same.
    computably · 1790983534 · focus · HN ↗
    I doubt that agents can make a product as polished as Slack. The status quo would indicate that's not the case as the prediction that SaaS would die has not panned out at all.
    KronisLV · 1790983694 · focus · HN ↗
    > The quality of Mattermost and Zulip was NOT exactly as polished as Slack.
    Mattermost isn't actually all that bad and its mental model is pretty close to Slack, at least compared to Zulip. I actually prefer Mattermost to Teams, and would view it in the same ballpark as Slack.
    > Deployment of such stacks was a problem. A complicate operational overhead.
    Not at all! Their stack is actually very reasonable and quite easy to setup: <a href="https://github.com/mattermost/docker/blob/main/docker-compose.yml" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/mattermost/docker/blob/main/docker-compos...
    Nowhere near the nightmare that self-hosting Sentry is like: <a href="https://github.com/getsentry/self-hosted/blob/master/docker-compose.yml" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/getsentry/self-hosted/blob/master/docker-...
    I'd say that in Mattermost's case the group calling functionality was locked behind a subscription as well as some other stuff last I checked, which makes it dead on arrival for many. It was quite nice software though, even before being able to vibe code your own (though tackling videos sharing and RTMP will be anything but trivial).
    > Make pixel perfect clone of Slack or Jira with SQLite or ejabberd behind.
    There's A LOT of functionality and features in Jira, the only thing that saves claims like that is that you probably don't use 80% and can just build what your company needs. I more or less did that for the hell of it (MariaDB + Garage + Dropwizard/Java + Angular/Spartan) and there was still so much supervision an changes that were needed - after pulling the Jira DB scheme and throwing about 60% of it in the trash (didn't need the automation), there was still A LOT of stuff to do and even the plans eat up a whole bunch of the context of the coding tools you intend to use, no matter how many checks and scripts you write to automate guardrails for when the models simply don't recall everything that is relevant.
    For people who want to self-host something basic, there's already the excellent <a href="https://kanboard.org/" rel="nofollow">https://kanboard.org/ (very very fast)
    For those that want something similarly depressingly slow to Jira while still locking some stuff behind a subscription (at least in the versions I tried) there's the passable <a href="https://www.openproject.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.openproject.org/
    If those don't fit and you don't see anything exactly like what you need, you might try to build your own. But yeah, not a weekend project.
    creata · 1790997246 · focus · HN ↗
    > Agents can: Make pixel perfect clone of Slack or Jira with SQLite or ejabberd behind.
    If it's that easy, then maybe you can do it and give the world a free and better-than-Zulip alternative to Slack?
    wg0 · 1790999475 · focus · HN ↗
    You're missing the point.
    Software in individual service doesn't have to scale, secure or maintainable.
    Software is a thruway artefact now.
    People are having hard time realizing that.
    creata · 1791003418 · focus · HN ↗
    Software... doesn't have to be secure?
    I have to admit, I really am having a hard time realizing that.
    imtringued · 1791018091 · focus · HN ↗
    If everyone is supposed to pay to make a worthless throwaway product then why would anyone decide to make the throwaway product in the first place instead of buying the same software as is?
    It's not like you will have a unique cost advantage over someone selling to many people.
    sillyfluke · 1791024169 · focus · HN ↗
    I think people are talking past each other when discussing this topic. A individual service/custom solution is not a throwaway product.
    >It's not like you will have a unique cost advantage over someone selling to many people.
    Of cource you would? Not having to worry about the priorities of hundreds of other client companies is a very valuable upfront cost advantage for a company I would think.
    Let's say issue trackers weren't around before LLMs. They would look like the perfect internal tool to vibe-code within your company. The idea that something like JIRA would make sales and profit in the same ball park if it was built after LLMs seems hard to believe, some might even question if it could be a sustainable business.
    But I do think the parent underestimates the feature creep and maintainability costs of internal tools regardless of LLMs. The idea that the total cost will only be two weeks when everything is said and done seems a tad optimistic.
    It seems reasonable to assume that once the field gets over their cocaine high of building instant PoC software and has to deal with the headache of working with a plethora of half-assed internal tools, just like when the field went through the same iterations in the pre-SaaS era or even when PCs first came out, then they will pay up for something like JIRA again. The only difference this time is that something like JIRA will probably be a one-person company.
  3. habinero · 1791069211 · focus · HN ↗
    You absolutely cannot vibecode a Jira in two weeks lol, and if you think you can, you don't understand what Jira actually is.
    Try it for real. I promise you you'll quickly understand why Jira is what it is. It is absolutely _not_ just a CRUD app.

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