It also says a lot of right things in just the right way at just the right time.

If you miss the message, one less person to compete with.

We get it. You're one of gods chosen, who alone can recognize ai. Thank you for your beloved beneficence.

Fable helped me edit since I'm not a native English speaker, so I might not catch these subtleties. Thought and structure are my own

This is just the old argument in favour of SaaS, though. The article is pointing out that those long-standing rules may no longer make sense, in a world where 1. it no longer takes even a weekend to build the niche, perfectly custom tool and 2. the maintenance / feature requests side is also just a prompt away.

At my job (we're somewhere in the transition between startup -> enterprise), we still use a lot of SaaS and are continuing to do so, but even there we're starting to move off certain platforms (Pendo, is a recent casualty) as we've realized in many cases we can just build it ourselves, pay drastically less, and actually get to control how it all works.

My suspicion, though I could be wrong: SaaS will move more and more towards focusing solely on the enterprise. Personal users and startups will have a harder time justifying both the cost and lack of flexibility of pure software SaaS. Enterprise will continue to be ok with paying the costs in exchange for compliance and vendor stuff and integration and whatever else they care about.

> Most of the effort in software goes into understand people other than you and building guardrails for them.

100%, which is why I think hyper-tailored, small software is an exciting option. When you shift your goal to serve 1000 customers, the hardest part is not having a tech stack that supports them, but making sure the software is good enough for all their different needs. Or you try to meet them all and you get into feature creep.

> For businesses, the buy vs. build tradeoff does now have some new compelling evidence in favour of "buy" but there's still maintenance needed for the service internally

What if you neither buy or build the software but buy the service outcome?

A data analyst that creates custom workflows with auto-generated dashboards. A dev-ops that provides access with exactly the information you need, depending on the hand-off level you want for the process.

My point is that a lot of these micro tools that started to appear the last few years will vanish, either bundled with bigger SAAS, internalized, or shifted to a service offering. This trend started with productized services, this is the next step.

> SaaS is far from dead.

Micro SAAS*. I agree with all your points, but I do believe the small software landscape will change drastically in the coming years

> It's easy to build something for yourself that solves your own use case. You know how you work and what's important to you. Most of the effort in software goes into understand people other than you and building guardrails for them.

Fully agreed. It's also just a time saver. People are lazy, and I don't mean that in a bad way, just that people don't really want to sit there and explain to an agent exactly what they want software to function like. In fact, most people don't even actually know what they want software to function like.

It doesn't just stop at humans either. When I recently started creating my smart budgeting app, Claude pointed me to use Clerk for auth. So not even the AI wants to build everything from scratch.

Bad example: uber is not a saas at all

It's a network.

From what ive seen we see no more features and quality is getting worse.

OP is ascribing magical powers to AI which it does not have. sure, it can replace a shitty poorly coded todo app. but nobody wanted that anyway.

> Senior interface designer > if you click on the website, it sends out pixelated ripples over the whole screen

Text is WCAG AAA?

He can design good looking interfaces, just not accessible ones I guess.

I mean the website does look good, it's just hard to read.

or his success depends on his perceived confidence. meaning that maybe he is scared, but doesn't want to show it because it would make it worse.

care to share some key takeaways? not really keen on listening to a half hour audio.

yeah, strange given that the article is about design systems...

if it was built with AI then the knowledge of the builder is not really adding much. the next person coming in to fix issues is just going to feed the thing into an AI too, and ask the AI to fix the problem they have.

In a way, this new dynamic of 'everyone can code' reminds me of the Unbundling -> Bundling -> Unbundling cycle of how entertainment media went from 3 broadcast channels to cable channels to web videos to our current state of bundled streaming services, with no end in sight.

Not to forget DVD shipping eras (Sony should not discontinue physical game sales, someone needs to get us silicon/holographic/terabyte recording media already), the focus is on the bundling/unbundling of software making. Slack + Salesforce vs 'we vibed our own chat and CRM just for us'...aka a Neo-SAP ERP program.

It's a cambrian explosion of software where lots are going to learn in realtime that the code was never the value of a software engineer / software, the value is in the shared understanding of an information system or workflow or business value stream, that parts of which happen to run through digital information systems.

By the time AI is done with us, its market effects mean in order to stay employable/added value beyond just widget-watchers, we will all be business strategy experts, or we will be algorithm-fed-doped-up mindless beasts, Morlocks vs Eloi, not because of AI itself, but because of the current rapaciousness of business leaders and an assumed trajectory where society doesn't adapt to social movements and actions now made possible by the existence of LLMs.

Sidneote: the LLMs themselves are not IMO going to achieve AGI any time soon. There might be a compilation of disparate systems and LLMs form part of 'tissues' of an eventual AGI, but not currently.

Definitely. I wonder if this will be an increasing factor when choosing vendors. Will the security risk drive companies away from small software, due to their use of AI? Will we see a bundling of features in big established vendors?

Will they invest more into in-house security? (Doubting the last one).

For small apps used to deliver a service in my examples, I believe the risk surface is way narrower, which might make it more acceptable. For better of for worse

Haha sorry about that. I made the changes quickly since a lot of people were reading, and I wanted people to focus on the content

this is quite literally the point of the article...

Possibly.. I admit I'm quite bad with distribution, hence why I usually work with a few clients long-term.

But we do see a sharp rise in the release of apps, without the same tendency in use. [1]

I do think there will be a place for SAAS, even micro-SAAS, but the competition will be fierce and I don't have a lot of hope for indiehacker without any "unfair advantages" like unique knowledge, data, network, etc

[1] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ericseufert_this-ft-chart-vis...

I don't know, I feel like my OCD clicking has finally been rewarded appropriately. Usually it just results in navigating to weird places via links that are hidden in the formatting. But this time it was delightful! And I was rewarded with a game!

You might want to try what I do: run JS in allowlist mode:

https://github.com/maximelebreton/quick-javascript-switcher

By default, I don't run into these problems and save a lot of compute!

I actually like the creativity

Yeah my bad, this is a fun effect for the landing, didn't think much of it when publishing the first article, fixing now, thanks for feedback!

Has it been fixed? What was the effect, I'm so curious now.

Omg the effect gives me physical jitters

https://xkcd.com/1172/

WTF?!? That is INSANE