Thread

1. socializer · 1790984425 · focus · HN ↗

   I've heard some variant of the SaaS doomsday prophecy dozens of times over the past year. Somehow, SaaS is still here and more or less looks the same.

   It will probably continue to exist because most businesses are perfectly content to outsource tech problems to someone else for a reasonable fee, and if you think that managing an agent swarm is a seamless replacement for that, I don't know what you tell you. The vast majority of business owners don't want the added complexity in their life.

   And for the same reason, most SaaS will probably not migrate to some radically new UX paradigm. Some of it will be vibecoded, but the UX will probably continue to be deterministic. I think this might change once a new breed of "LLM-native" business owners takes charge, but that's going to be a slow process, and it will be hampered by prosaic concerns about interoperability, support, predictable cost, and liability for mistakes (from "the agent did a bit of tax fraud" to "the agent decided to hack my competition").

   1. estearum · 1790988886 · focus · HN ↗

      As a general rule, expecting prophesies to be realized or invalidated within a year is pretty silly.

      That said, your point can be distilled down to: comparative advantage. It still exists and so SaaS will likely still exist. But per the article, it'll probably look pretty different (and a lot less profitable) over time.

      I think the reason it'll look different is that it's very hard to make powerful software that's also walk-up usable. The idea that you can provide just the core concepts of a piece of software and allow AI to interact with those concepts more directly, or allow your users to use AI to build their ideal (and ever-changing) interfaces to your concepts seems pretty convincing to me.

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