> Want to import recipes from a website or pull your bank transactions into your new dashboard? Just ask. In this future of open pipes…

If we truly had open pipes devoid of ads, tracking, subscriptions, custom data formats and other obstacles to third-parties, we wouldn’t have needed AI or ephemeral software. There would have been an abundance of third party software for commonly-found backends.

I remember when bsd was dying..

I feel like an old timer, looking back on history repeating itself.

API endpoints for recipes across sites over the internet or your banking app aren't open. Maybe the AI could crawl it, but does that work at scale? Can it do it without error or being blocked?

And for lots of apps, it's about users and data. There's been a million Twitter clones over the years but very few ever caught on. An AI generated Twitter won't get users...

The title is "SaaS is dead," but the first paragraph describes capabilities of Vercel's v0... which is a SaaS, right?

I have had the bright idea of replacing a couple of SaaS I rely on with the assistance of AI. I will note that I do consider a LLMs a genuine productivity boost. Observations:

1) It took a lot longer than I had hoped and I doubt the hours spent are worth the cost savings. Turns out a lot of SaaS I use are actually quite detailed products with lots of features and functionality that take a lot of time and consideration to replicate effectively.

2) Once you finish building that SaaS replacement, you are signing up to operate, maintain and secure it as long as you are running it. More time investment.

My realization is that, yes, AI can help me replace a couple other products I use and some of it is an interesting exercise. But signing up to build and manage a dozen services for my own use that I was previously paying a nominal fee for (in addition to all my other professional commitments) is probably not the utopia I might have thought it was.

This is pretty similar to the contemplating rewriting an app. There's usually a lot of knowledge and nuance built into legacy software that was hard-won, edge cases that are dealt with. Rewriting the app may be a good idea, but you have to ensure you're not losing what the legacy learned.

You can certainly make one-off apps to deal with things as they come up. But unless you are already an expert on what you need, you will still spend time building (or vibe coding), reacting to domain holes that you could also just spend $20/mo to ignore entirely.

The gap is smaller for sure, but it's not gone.

The chatbot gurus 10 years ago were parroting the same thing. Nobody needs an app, everyone ll use a chatbot. And now "nobody needs a saas, everyone ll use an LLM" Sounds familiar? You got 1 part of the entire thing wrong "The large language model has effectively read the entire internet’s worth of React docs and StackOverflow threads, so it produces reliable code in that stack with minimal fuss."

See, the "SaaS is dead" falls in a similar trope like "I can build facebook/uber/twitter/instagram/blabla in a weekend". They make this assumption because they usually lack experience. Sure you can, and soon you will learn what 80/20 means in software development and why most people prefer to rather pay for a known working product than to wrangle the 80/20 prompt after prompt.

SaaS or software to a larger extent is domain knowledge + quality code.

Does AI generate high quality code now? Yes but not always. Will it close the gap in the long run? Maybe, but unlikely. Chatbots are software themselves. And mass production of commodity requires standard assembly line. The majority of software products cannot be mass produced.

Every time I read some statement like "You don’t install software anymore; you ask for it", it's not some typical non-technical office worker making the claims who is actually using the technology in this way. And when I check who is making the claim, it' always some foaming-at-the-mouth tech founder shilling their AI/No-Code platform who is about to run out of money.

Every. Time.

> Thanks to large AI models, we’re now on the cusp of user interfaces built from simple prompts.

Idk. If this were true I feel like we’d be seeing the implosion of a lot of companies’ valuations. This statement of “we’re on the cusp” keeps being presented uncritically, as if the progress in LLMs hasn’t completely plateaued over the past year.

I don’t think we’re anywhere close to replacing real humans with brains. If anything, it’s becoming clearer by the day that LLMs are not doing anything like the abstract symbolic reasoning needed to build true quality software.

Good luck achieving the support quality, sales pipelines, and developer ecosystem with a prompt

My experience at the minute is that AI is good at writing functionally correct code, but bad at writing clean code. This is why it quickly gets out of hand if you don't manually refine the output and rely solely on the vibes - if you keep building without refining it quickly becomes non-functional spaghetti. I've found that it's quite good at "colouring in" - you sketch out or partially sketch out what you want just using descriptive function names and then the AI can fill in the blanks. Once a boilerplate is established and you need to repeat it multiple times that's where it really shines and saves a lot of time.

I don't think this is likely to be a real issue in the grand scheme of things.

SaaS customers pay for a product that provides a workflow and a structure for solving their problem without them having to think too hard about a solution. They are outsourcing the problem-solving work, not just the programming effort.

If you must worry, you should be thinking about the new wave of competitors and copycats using LLMs to replace their programming effort. They are the ones coming to eat your lunch if you don't have a defensible market position.

I have mixed thoughts on this post. I’m a pretty senior product designer. V0, Gemini and these other tools Can build pretty impressive prototypes. I am repeatedly asked how I am using these AI tools in my workflow. The answer is—I’m not really.

These tools are a novelty now. But I do think these will improve drastically in the next 5 or so years. When they have more context about the existing code base and design system and customer issues I think we’ll see a big leap forward.

Does that mean SaaS is dead?

Maybe small CRUD apps with few users? I think a lot of people on this forum miss that with enterprise software, business are buying processes. The software is just the codified way to execute on that.

AI is already making these processes different. But I think we’re probably going to see more SaaS to replace old and support new processes.

The author is a co-founder of an AI platform that reviews code. Kinda ironic when they say SaaS is dead.

Their other blog post talks about how writing code is a thing of the past. They also have a gem where they say:

> Think garbage collection versus free(): once the platform got smarter, we happily stopped counting pointers.

No.. no we didn't.

Most SaaS these days are really about gatekeeping some resource (typically data, or a marketplace) so while you can replicate the gate, it's really unlikely you can replicate the resource on your own. Like random example, I could vibe code a social network, but I can't make people switch to it.

A lot of clerical work was managed by SaaS which managed clerical workers. As AIs can do these internal jobs you don’t need the software seat licenses any more.

Word processors and Spreadsheets did the same thing and remain powerful today.

I don’t see the world lacking in software or bureaucracy.

The Tower of Babel is the reason. Idle humans diverge develop and complicate every domain in order to compete with each other. Nothing truly ever gets simpler until there is a replatforming; and then things get complicated again. There are more and deeper rabbit holes every day.

Many old SaaS products from the last cycle are shrinking. However whatever. Keep going. Still more work to do until the world is perfect.

I work in the technical diligence space, assessing startups and (in the process) getting privileged information about companies.

This is complete and utter bullshit. What it takes to separate your company from the herd may change, but asserting that the model of selling software as a subscription service is dead is delusional.

SaaS isn’t dead — it’s evolving. New models like AI-powered microservices and vertical SaaS are reshaping the landscape

Good!! SaaS was a mistake anyway

I’ve vibe coded a few very cool apps for my personal and professional life but every time I do it I’m left wondering: how revolutionary is this? It is _very_ cool and very helpful for me, but bespoke vibecoded apps are never going to replace the big apps my company spends money on: HubSpot, slack, Figma, canva, shortcut, gong, google stuff. So much of the magic in those apps is in robust multi user support and reliability. Sure I can vibe code a multiplayer app (I’ve done it!) but do I trust the auth implementation? If my team needs new features am I going to spend the time vibe coding and then QAing the full app again to make sure it hasn’t borked anything?

I think it’s great for long tail apps but I’m not at all sure what effect that will have, socially economically or culturally.

I can see huge utility in vibecoding as a front end for app customization — tell your BI platform to build you a dashboard with just the items you want, oh and add a button that opens our crm in a new window. Bespoke interfaces for existing, trusted platforms.

I love the idea that there’s some cyberpunk future waiting for us where there are no existing apps, just a way to construct utility on the fly. But imo it misses some core understanding of how people systems and apps actually work.