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Every SaaS business will become a harness around a model

164 points · 109 comments · iacguy

  1. socializer · · 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. jerf · · focus · HN ↗
      No amount of AI, barring something not just superhuman but radically superhuman, can substitute for contact with the real world: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jerf.org&#x2F;iri&#x2F;post&#x2F;2026&#x2F;what_value_code_in_ai_era&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jerf.org&#x2F;iri&#x2F;post&#x2F;2026&#x2F;what_value_code_in_ai_era&#x2F;

      Again, barring radical superhumanity, in many cases companies do not today want their own bespoke solutions to a problem and wouldn&#x27;t want it even if the developers were working for free, because the other costs to the business would still be more than they want to pay and more than another business can charge to make the problem more thoroughly (even if not completely) go away.

      I suspect this is another reason you may see some companies making grabs at data and points-of-presence that otherwise make little or no sense... they&#x27;re trying to colonize and defend the sources of contact with the real world before someone else gets there and locks them out.

      1. lightandlight · · focus · HN ↗
        Great article! You&#x27;ve pinned down a bunch of intuitions that have been floating around my head lately. I especially liked the Ahmdahl&#x27;s law reference.
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