I wish i could take back the view i gave to this article, it says nothing. Is there such a thing as an inverse hype machine? Where people take the opposite side of a hyped product and then hype that view just as much but for the same purpose? His footer even admits he's basically just trolling for views so he can reach the status of "thought leader".
btw, someone else having the same idea you have for a saas company has always been the case forever. Individuals taking shortcuts in quality to get to market faster has also been the case forever. There's nothing new about either of those two things.
Exactly. If someone pitched you a book about a young kid who goes to a school of magic to learn how to use his powers, makes friends and enemies and ultimately battles evil, you might shoot down their dreams because "some cocaine-addled sales critter" already had that idea, and she's called J K Rowling and she's worth billions and shes so successful she can't even be cancelled because she makes so much money.
And yet, Patrick Rothfuss's The Name Of The Wind is the same concept, and sold over a million copes,
Lev Grossman's The Magicians is again the same concept, sold millions, and was adapted into a 5 season TV series for SyFy.
If anything, the success of an idea only leads to a bigger appetite for that idea.
BTW, The Magicians TV series might be the best thing SyFy ever made. It's got so much heart, it's properly funny, it's creative, it's epic despite a shoestring budget, and the characters stay with you long after you finish.
Agreed I loved it! Right up until they turned it into a musical for some reason. Me and my wife call it "doing a magicians" when a TV show suddenly starts singing for no reason.
Damn I had noticed a lot of series doing it, but I guess it's wider than I thought!
The Magicians overdid it though. It's not a musical episode, iirc it's like 2 seasons
Edit: just to be clear, I still watched those 2 entire seasons, because the story is genuinely that good, plus I was invested. But I really wish they hadn't gone musical, it really messed with the mood of the series.
Is TNotW really the same concept as Harry Potter? It has a university in it, which I guess is similar to a school, and after a while the main character ends up there, but it's a very different concept - it's classic high fantasy that includes a period of learning and study, whereas HP is primarily boarding school fiction with magical elements. Similarly, The Magicians, as I understand it, is also more about a university, and is perhaps closer in lineage to Buffy or Charmed than to Harry Potter - it has more of that focus on the interpersonal relationships between characters, and a more complex morality.
The better comparison is probably with Percy Jackson, which isn't quite the same concept (being an American series, where boarding school fiction isn't quite as well-known a genre) but matches the ages, sense of discovery, and relationships to authority figures far better.
This isn't directly relevant to your point, but I really find it wild that people see two stories that have magic and a school in them and go "look, it's the same thing", especially when the genres and tropes of the two books are so utterly different. For that matter, Harry Potter is also nothing like Earthsea, which is another common reference point. I wonder if Americans just don't have as much experience with boarding school fiction to be able to categorise Harry Potter as a series?
Well, that kind of was exactly my point, although I feel now I didn't make it very clearly.
Someone might shoot down a prospective author who intends to write a book featuring a young protagonist getting a formal education in magic because it's "been done", but the resulting works are very different. It was a counterpoint to the article saying that we should not try to realise our ideas because someone somewhere has had "the same idea". They probably have had an idea which could be described in a similar fashion, but it doesn't really mean its the "same idea"
I probably stumbled a bit describing those books as the same concept when I should have put "same idea" in quotes
I think in that case, you're missing what the article is saying. It's not talking about building something new but not having people understand it. It's saying that anything new that you can build, someone else can build faster with AI.
To stretch the book analogy beyond breaking point, it would be like if Patrick Rothfuss released The Name of the Wind, and JK Rowling immediately put out "Harry Potter and the Kingkiller Chronicles, now with added Kvothe", and basically used her name and the Harry Potter brand to outcompete Rothfuss selling the same thing. (Obviously for books, you've got copyright, but there's no copyright for your favourite app idea.)
I think the extent to which that is actually true is hard to say, but I think it's a different point to the one you're arguing against here.
Your point came through clearly to me. Shared tropes or setting do not make identical stories and, in fact, often enhance them as a counterbalance or familiar thing to compare against.
A wise friend of mine once said, in regard to "ideas are nothing; execution is everything": you can tell a thousand artists to paint a portrait of an Italian woman with a countryside landscape behind her but, good or bad, none of them are the mona lisa.
Every business has secrets. You don’t know why a business succeeds unless you know their edge. Looking at my SaaS you’d think you could copy it. And perhaps you could make something that looks the same. But you don’t know my secrets and there is no way I’m telling you. So you will never beat me
The whole premise is very unimaginative. It just takes one step on the infinite series and does not ask what the asymptote is (if there even is one).
If every coked up SDR can build a tech stack, then every junior SWE can get superhuman SEO.
If every product has superhuman seo and engineering, and there are 10 or 100x more products, then probably everyone uses the exact right one for their needs, and quality for your specific usecase is higher. (More competition means more quality, more of every differentiator, including lower prices. )
In a world of zero marginal cost of production (turning ideas into reality with a prompt), maybe it’s hard for anyone to eke out profit margin; I can’t see what anyone’s edge would be in this world. The end state here is much more disruptive than “dang, a coked up sdr out-competed me on my SaaS ide-“.
The edge is ownership - of GPUs, capital, connections and distribution channels (this includes SEO).
Also, SEO will be meaningless if LLMs will be the main discovery channels. Much less transparent, and we are already seeing that, for example the "what about South African ***code" grok system prompt manipulation from a few months back.
Side projects don't die from lack of time. They die from success anxiety. Shipping means facing judgment. An eternal WIP stays safe in the "potential" zone where it can't disappoint anyone including yourself
Yep, that feels likely. When tech people don't ship, they overarchitect. Add all the stuff 'the big guys' have to Be Ready for the big time when you launch. And then never launch after spending 1000s on infrastructure, tools etc. I have done it, I see many people do it around me.
I'm going through this now. Once I start selling (hardware product), the cat is out of the bag, and further development becomes more difficult because there are paying customers. And we don't have the capacity to scale up if we "go viral". But AI has me pushing to do this somewhat prematurely because there's no guarantee I'll still be employed at the end of the year (due to "AI"), so the side project has to become a real thing right now.
> Quality is not a metric anyone cares about in 2026.
When you write operational critical code, it matters. No one can blame “the AI made me do it” when things go down and hundreds of thousands of people are without service.
When your code can hurt people, it matters. You can’t burn someone’s eye with a laser then point to some AI agent when lawsuits start flying in.
When millions of dollars in production data is lost or corrupted, who is responsible? Not AI. Quality matters.
I keep hearing this one phrase about code quality again and again. Sure, no one cares about the dumb little linter failing your builds, but when code quality comes to responsibility, it goes hand in hand. It’s either that or your all working on hobby projects.
I'm sure "bad quality" will soon be classified in the "cost of doing business" section like fines for not respecting laws.
That's why AI is hurting us so much right now.
We were always trying to have quality in our project, whether it was for readability or for code evolution.
No, Steve, you don't name your 42 variables with only two letter and no you don't use Norse mythology for naming servers in your infrastructure.
Yes Odin is the most powerful so it's the production server but Tyr for the source control and print server isn't really obvious.
Well now AI is Steve.
It will create nice little 300 lines functions with a block repeating 6 times. You know that you will have 6 fix to make instead of one if this block was in a simple function.
It's not instinct a this point, is pure knowledge screaming "it's wrong".
And you now realise that the hidden strength from your craft wasn't about coding the best binary tree search algorithm, it was about knowing the underlying soft unknowns that really made it software.
We have a strong feeling that we're watching dozens of kids running with scissors and we don't know whether it's really scissors, we're just getting too old for this shit, or if we should just stop "progress" because we don't like it.
We're the horse breeders when everyone discovered cars.
> I'm sure "bad quality" will soon be classified in the "cost of doing business"
But that cost is not trivial. In some topics (but not limited) like medial devices, the legal liability would just bankrupt the company. Not so cheap compared to hiring a few humans. I’m picking an obvious cases here, but there are many others.
> Norse mythology for naming servers in your infrastructure
Ouch, yeah seen this a few times, outside of Scandinavia.
As a Saas or tool company, you’re a manufacturer or maybe a wholesaler.
Your customers are paying you $1000 a month to handle a process that is worth $10k to them and might be worth $50k to their customers. If you lose that data you haven’t lost $1000 of data. Even if you only made $100 off of the transaction.
to be fair, the blog post is talking about personal side projects, not Lasik software.
for personal side projects of the "handy SAAS thing that gives all your JSON a lustrous sheen" variety, he's probably more on target that quality seems to have gone by the wayside.
Maybe it's wishful thinking, being one of the SaaS-developing developers he describes. But I think that only the complexity required for a SaaS is increasing. You certainly can't earn millions with the kind of SaaS that used to take a week or two, and can now be done on a weekend. So I am trying the kind of SaaS that I never dared to start, knowing that it would take a year or two of my spare time. And with AI agents, I now hope to complete it in 3 or 4 months, with a lot of extra features I would never have dared to include in an MVP.
Mainly, a friendly and simple UI. Feedly looks like it hasn't gotten much love recently. Inoreader is too cluttered for my taste, though it has a feature set I can't match any time soon.
I have plenty of other ideas for what to build on top of it: offering an SDK and APIs so you can vibe-code the UI you want, a built-in podcast listener, using news from aggregated feeds to build a personalized AI feed. But the first step is to reach the Google Reader feature set minus social features.
I think you're in a tough market, but I'll agree that Feedly hasn't gotten much love, and is clearly aiming for a more enterprise market.
API access is worth chasing. There was something I wanted to do with Feedly (I've already forgotten what it was) but once I saw their APIs were hidden behind some enterprise level plan, that was the end of that. If we're in a world where everyone has a personal AI agent, giving their agent an API key to their RSS sync account... that might have some interest.
Feedly seems hostile to third-party client access (ie mobile & desktop apps), so being friendlier towards RSS clients could be of interest.
Personalized AI feed is a good idea but you don't have all the personalized year of context that my Claude does. My AI agent is (probably) going to do a better job of choosing the most relevant stuff.
And personally, less interested in podcasts in my RSS app. That's something for Pocket Casts / AntennaPod. I like my audio separate from my RSS. But that's me.
> I think you're in a tough market, but I'll agree that Feedly hasn't gotten much love, and is clearly aiming for a more enterprise market.
Yes, enterprise is certainly where the money is (Feedly's plans start at $1600/month...), but as a solo dev working on a side-project, that's not an accessible market for me anyway. So I try to create a service that's simple and cheap.
> My AI agent is (probably) going to do a better job of choosing the most relevant stuff.
The idea would be basically: the feed reader know the user's interests because of the subscriptions, and knows the last time the user logged in. So it can filter what happened since then; it can also order the posts by relevance, allowing the user to catch up.
And in a second step, an agent could even write the posts dynamically, summarizing information gathered from the user's feed, possibly even adjusted to the user's level of knowledge and offering background info where needed.
> And personally, less interested in podcasts in my RSS app. That's something for Pocket Casts / AntennaPod. I like my audio separate from my RSS.
There are some feeds that are more like a mixture of text and podcast. I usually read only the text, but sometimes it catches my interest and I want to listen to one or two posts. That's when I start hating the lack of podcast support in Feedly.
Tough market. What’s your differentiator over Readwise? They are crushing it on the “power user feed reader”.
Best of luck though, I think this is a very promising space. (But my bet is you can do all the interesting stuff in vibe-coded thin UI + OSS pipeline.)
Simplicity. I can get you reading your first feed in under a minute. Also, I am not really thinking about monetization right now, but I am building a feed reader I want to use. I wouldn't want to spend $13 a month for it.
> thin UI + OSS pipeline
No, the UI isn't that thin. I am optimizing it to minimize my costs for operating it. Everything I can do inside the client is done inside the client. Interactions with the server are mostly limited to polling every 2 minutes for feed updates, and sending read markers after 3 seconds of inactivity. Feed data is stored on CDN, compressed.
I'm using (self-hosted) Nextcloud News, what would your... service? Tool? Product? ... offer beyond what NN does? It is quite simple as well, offers an uncluttered interface, keeps my subscriptions as private as RSS subscriptions can be. I suspect you're targeting a different market from the one catered by self-hosted services like Nextcloud?
I am not familiar with Nextcloud News. In the first version, it probably won't offer much for you, besides having a catalog of feeds, the ability to search them, and subscribe with one click, which is usually not offered by non-cloud RSS readers.
For people who do not want to use self-hosted services (which generally includes me), it offers simplicity. Open the page, choose Google as auth provider, confirm, and you will get a friendly start page. Click on 'follow' on one of the feeds, and you can start reading immediately. The UI is more like Facebook or X, so basically, you just need to scroll. Either in a feed of your choice, or all your feeds. It's designed to work well on small mobile screens, tablets, and desktops, with great keyboard support on the latter. Larger screens use two or three columns.
I got out of software and into physical products a couple of years ago. I wish I could say I was prescient, but honestly it's just so much easier to sell physical items.
Margins are worse, but selling is easier. If you've got a thing you can be sure that someone somewhere will give you money for it.
Kind of looks like vibecoding is doing to SaaS what Chinese mass manufacturing did to physical products two decades ago. Only the marketing and distribution matter in a world where it's very easy for others to clone something and sell it at a lower price.
> Only the marketing and distribution matter in a world where it's very easy for others to clone something and sell it at a lower price
Great point. AI remixes and rips-off existing code-bases in a manner that is impossible to attribute copyright violation making it legal. ie, Perfect cloning. In a world where cloning is legal, the engineering cost of product drops to zero. That is where software production could be headed. What remains is marketing/distribution/sales.
There will remain niches solving "hard problems" which cant be cloned, but those will be rare. Hard problems are where a lot of engineering complexity resides, involving interacting components for which there are no examples in training datasets to copy from. For example, a complex distributed system or hardware with multiple nuanced tradeoffs.
And yet people can still make money producing and selling high quality physical products. It's a smaller market but there are people who don't want mass produced chinese crap and they go out of their way to find it.
There will be people who will pay for "human coded" software if it is better. Quality is always a differentiator that some people will pay for.
A friend of mine dabbles in niche hardware products. The amount of work he has to put in to get the CE and other certifications is significant. That’s before assembly, shipping (including customs shenanigans) and… returns.
For a software guy like me, digital products seem much less daunting… and of course they scale “perfectly”.
Nice smokers though, must be nice to earn money from something like that, congrats!
Well, you're like then opposite version of me :D I was into physical products and services most of my life, and from recently I'm just trying to create stuff that can be sold digitally :D Still not there, but slowly getting to it.
I always got the impression that the only way a relatively average software developer could make a “successful” SaaS is if they built something weird and niche that appeals to an audience of <1000 paying customers. In that sense, it doesn’t really matter if your competition is better at SEO since your competition never even thought to build something like this, never cared, and not to mention that the market for this thing is so small that SEO is arguably a wasted skill. You’ll need to acquire these people by finding them directly or through word of mouth.
This blog post seems to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of solo-developer SaaS, but then again arguably mostly software developers also fundamentally misunderstand it.
This vibes with me, though I think it's overly glum.
You can't hope to succeed by building something cool without distribution already figured out. If you haven't put the work in building a social following, you're pretty much locked into pay to play (which isn't horrible if you target small targeted bloggers/youtubers/etc, but it's not my bag). OpenClaw exploded because Peter has >100k twitter followers and among them are plenty of people who themselves have a ton of followers.
So, if you're building, you also need to focus on building an audience.
The high touch enterprise sales strategy is solid though, and easier to bootstrap. That's why Alex Hormozi and Dan Martell push people getting started that way.
I think what is left is that understanding pain points and knowing what problems needs solved is more important now than ever. If anyone can create a product now then the one who knows what product to actually create is the winner. And who might this be? Well it might just be the people who spent the last 10 years speaking to customers, building a SaaS. They have 10 years of taking to customers finding out what to build. Even if they were to start from scratch today they already have the requirements in their pocket.
The game has change. The ‘how’ we build it is easy. The ‘what’ we build is and always has been the hardest part of any SaaS or business.
> The game has change. The ‘how’ we build it is easy. The ‘what’ we build is and always has been the hardest part of any SaaS or business.
This is what the promptfondlers don't want to admit: the how has been easy for a long time. This last, I dunno, 35 years or so, Visual Basic, Delphi, whatnot, producing code has been very easy. You don't need a fundamentally fascist probabilistic nightmare to do it. The hard problems are indeed is "what" to build and how we maintain it. There's only hype. There's no results. https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware...
> By “fascist” in this context, I mean that it is well suited to centralizing authority, eliminating checks on that authority and advancing an anti-science agenda.
> This last, I dunno, 35 years or so, Visual Basic, Delphi, whatnot, producing code has been very easy
I’m not so sure about that. It’s very easy to take your own knowledge for granted. Most people can’t do what we do. Most of my customers couldn’t even express what they wanted.
Exactly. Software development is 20% of what your average software developer does. Figuring out what to build is a skill some don’t even realise they are doing every day, and it’s an incredibly valuable skill.
SaaS let's you simply pay to make blockers go away. Now that our time is more high leverage, why wouldn't you continue to do that?
Let's say you could vibe your own replacement to a $20/month app in 16 hours. Congratulations, you did work valued at an $15/hour less token expenses (over 1 year).
> Listen: every idea you've ever had, every single one, some cocaine-addled sales critter has had too. And they're better than you at SEO.
On most days I am resistant to stereotypes about "the welfare state" eroding incentives for entrepreneurism and innovation. But if you're going to wave it in my face like that, I might have to reconsider.
> Listen: every idea you've ever had, every single one, some cocaine-addled sales critter has had too.
You can test this, if you talk about your idea to three people and one of them says we're already doing that and the other two think you're insane, you'd be safe.
Features get users, but features introduce complexity, bugs, technical debt, and maintenance expenses.
More so this complexity requires that you have support for your users, and QA of weird functional interactions across systems boundaries that you just can't test for when actually writing the code.
I totally agree here. AI coding is raising the ceiling in terms of code quantity, but it also lowers the floor on quality, right into the sewer.
Fortunately experienced developers are in the best position to use these tools properly, evaluate what works and what doesn't. We might drown in slop first though.
The author seems to be complaining about the fact that you can't make a pet hobby project succeed purely out of technical excellence. First of all welcome to the club: musicians and artists and people of taste have long lived with the constant pain of watching the majority of people consume crap. Secondly: it's not true that products cannot succeed on the basis of pure technical excellence. Figma, TigerBeetle, and much software of the highest class have won the market on the basis of technical excellence, and it's the kind of thing amateurs with AI will never be able to build. You need to find an audience with a real problem and then produce a technically superior solution that an amateur with AI cannot.
Entering the SaaS market is dead because the market is saturated with mature products, not due to anything AI related. I've watched people try and enter the market we're in and fail because they can't build enough product to take any market share from anyone else.
The "elda för kråkorna" metaphor is perfect. I've watched three side projects in my circle get undercut by AI-generated clones with better SEO within weeks of launch. The uncomfortable truth is that the moat for small SaaS was never the code — it was distribution, and that game has completely changed.
>Yours actually works and is higher quality, because you know about things like TTFP and INP and "not putting your Supabase god-token in the client"? Oh, you sweet summer child: I take no pleasure in this but I need to tell you that these things don't matter anymore. Quality is not a metric anyone cares about in 2026.
Quality will matter the most in 2026. Specifically because the barrier-to-entry for making software is down there will of course be a lot of poor quality software, which will break, expose customer data, be bloated, etc. Customers will have more options, and this will allow them to be more discerning. Open source, clean code, low dependencies...these are things that can be evaluated by HN crowd types, but it's also something that an LLM can evaluate.
We are entering into an age of software taste. For those of us that have developed taste over the years, we become the taste makers in that we care how things are built, and know what we're looking for. This applies on the supply side, when our taste drives the LLM, and on the consumption side, when we can help the masses evaluate what to use and what not to use.
NB: this is all speculation expressed as fact, in keeping with the OP's style.
It already happened mostly outside the AI slop; only if you have marketing money you will succeed and your clients usually cannot distinguish bad from good; if you have VC money and 1B$ valuation you must be doing something right no?
I walk into products being garbage and basically broken (upgrade bottom doesn't work, email always broken, support form goes to dev null etc) and most products I try are b2b and many are enterprise SaaS.
Only yesterday, I am in the EU, I wanted to try out some enterprise software of a company with VC money valuated at billions, so I signed up for a demo which needed me to validate my email. But that email didn't arrive. I tried with 4 different addresses (different providers including google and ms): nothing. So I forgot about it and went on with my day; hours later, 1 hour after the west coast US woke up, I got all 4 emails with expired links. So I guess while sleeping, their system was broken. No worries, things happen, but they happen all the time and it doesn't matter how much money they have. They also often just refuse to fix things because why would they.
I threw out Canva because they refuse to fix fundamental issues and keep blaming the customers or play dumb 'oh we never saw this happen!' while you can just do a search and find heaps of people having the same issues. etc. Quality does not matter, at all. Deep marketing pockets do.
Just like the tide of fast fashion caused people to seek out local-sewn clothes made from high-quality materials, right? Right?
Quality isn’t a differentiator if the market is saturated with indistinguishable garbage. Everything is made in sweatshops out of the cheapest plastic available, and I don’t see why software isn’t next in line.
Actually: There’s been a noticeable uptick in the last decade+ of better-made clothing for shoppers who are open to paying somewhat higher prices. Not boutique prices, but also more expensive than H&M.
For a long time the stereotypical “young professional” look was tied closely to just a few mainstream retailers (Banana Republic for example), but over the last ~15 years a wider range of smaller or more specialized brands has entered the space: Alex Mill, Spier and Mackay, etc.
But even ignoring that your analogy doesn’t quite fit since price plays a significant role in clothing purchasing decisions: Fast fashion succeeds largely because it is cheap.
If reasonably priced, higher-quality alternatives were accessible people would buy them. It’s partly why certain brands have grown in popularity (Carhartt, for example).
Exactly - it turns into a market for lemons, where the customer is unwilling to make a bet or even invest in an evaluation if there's an overwhelming amount of crap and little ability to differentiate. Amazon is turning into this with QWENFOING everything.
Yeah it actually did do this for me. I will not purchase new clothing at all unless I have some understanding of the supply chain and where it was made, with a strong preference for clothes that are at least cut and sewn in the US. I won’t tolerate buying clothes, or really any textile product, if I can’t be relatively certain it will last me at least five years. A flood of cheap, unreliable shit did actually make me more discerning.
N of 1, obviously, but this isn’t as outlandish as you wanted to make it seem here.
> Customers will have more options, and this will allow them to be more discerning.
Lets assume this is true - how on earth are they to determine that your code doesn't have any glaring security holes but the 2h vibe-coded app has more holes than the Swiss is able to put into their cheese[1]?
I really want to know how customers can tell the difference between very pretty crap and your stuff?
You may be right about taste, but I think it takes a different dimension in the future.
"Dear Claude, please make me a clone of <fancy new saas> but make <these changes specific to my tastes>".
For many things, it's probably not "select the one of 100 that fits my taste", it's probably going to be to just make your own personal version that fits your taste in the first place. And, probably, never share that anywhere.
Someone needs a hug. Honestly I've started writing only to realize how much code output will be wasted over the next hour or two, so I just go back to coding the amazing product I'm working on with amazing agents, that would simply not be possible if I didn't have access to the AI tools I'm using. It's going to make many humans profoundly more safe. I'm very excited. I hope you are excited about your project too.
Has OP been at a company where sales people do this? I have, and I can tell you they have not gotten far.
There was one PM at my ex-job that showed a dashboard for... well... i honestly didnt understand. I think it was some uptime checks. It broke during his presentation.
There's a company I hired at that "built an ERP in 5 days and is shipping the product in June". Same thing happened, it broke when presenting. Basic feature suggestions just returned a "Yes, we can do that!" (they meant they can tell Claude to do it, not that the product could do it).
Maybe at some point non-engineers can prompt build, but for now I'd say we're pretty safe. I think engineers give themselves too little credit. Being able to read code is an amazing tool that can only be sharpened through skill.
Lastly, I think I commented this ~2 years ago as well. If your product is vibe-codable and is replacing customers, it's a shit product. Similarly, if you can outsource your product on fiverr, its's a shit product.
I haven't had much success using LLM's in Unity as there is a lot of work that goes into the editor and cannot be done via code, especially if you are using several different assets
On the flipside, there are a lot of businesses that don't open their digital product to multiple markets or verticals because the cost (in money or focus) is too high. Distribution just got a lot easier, arguably about as easy as it should have been in the first place. If you already have a reasonable moat for your product in a smallish market, going broad is a lot more feasible now. I'm doing it now (with partners who own the core product) and its going very well.
I mean just because it's easier to write software doesn't mean you can't have success building a business around software. You'll just need to build more features at a higher level of quality. When everyone has access to these tools the net effect will just be to elevate the overall quality of software which is good for everyone.
I think a lot of opportunities are closing. But I also think a lot of new ones are being created. Pretty much impossible to predict. AI may end up being like "the bomber will always get through": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_bomber_will_always_get_thr...
I feel like that isn't even anything new, most businesses have worked like that for a long time. It's much more straightforward to be a supplier for a few big clients than to be a B2C. We just don't hear about them as often because of their nature.
ok, but then to support him he suggests starring one of his github repos, isn't that just throwing out some breadcrumbs for the crows using his analogy?
If I understand it, the premise of this article is that because the marginal cost of software production is now free, now nobody can compete against garbage quality code sold by the slickest "sales critter", so everyone should just give up.
I mean, it seems at the very least, that open source and in-house production has a natural advantage here? If the marginal cost of software production is now free, then FOSS/in-house just got easier to create and maintain too. Does that make it easier for FOSS/in-house, both available without a subscription to an external third party, undermine "sales critter" SAAS, by the author's own premises?
> What's that you're saying? Yours actually works and is higher quality, because you know about things like TTFP and INP and "not putting your Supabase god-token in the client"? Oh, you sweet summer child: I take no pleasure in this but I need to tell you that these things don't matter anymore. Quality is not a metric anyone cares about in 2026.
That's funny and all but it can't really be true that quality doesn't matter. It has to matter at some point. Maybe it doesn't matter during the initial sales cycle; I've seen it happen: the CEO sees a slick demo that works, every user / developper rolls their eyes and try to warn them, they don't listen, and the deal is done.
But eventually if the thing that's supposed to be done, isn't, something will have to give. Even if at first they fire all the eye-rollers and replace them with obedient corporate drones, if the think isn't working and it's on the critical path, it will have to be replaced by something that actually does work.
I think the realistic take is to treat SaaS products like any other extremely skewed distribution, like income in sports.
Most people will barely make anything, some will be able to supplement their income, very few will be able to make a living. Even less will become "rich". For every product that blows up, there are thousands that will barely make anything.
But of course, it all depends on what your product does. If you make the millionth TODO / GenAI image editor / food calculator app and hope to make some money, good luck.
Yes, a very hyped mega-corp should be building and replacing all productivity software; why leave room for competitors when a single company can do it all? What can go wrong?
This is the kind of thing that anyone could have said at any time in history. Sure, it’s easier now to solve the kinds of problems that were hard a few years ago, but that just brings whole classes of previously “impossible” problems into the merely “hard” category. We’re just finding out what those are now, and if you can figure one out there’s money to be made.
You can only change the rules, you can never stop The Game™. Now, more than ever before, it's faster and easier to create something and deliver its perceived value at scale. Nerds used to rule the roost of tech because they were willing to invest the time and toil in obscurity. Now that's no longer the case. The only skill you need to have now is sales and showmanship. A chatbot can do the rest.
So nobody will ever start another successful software project? People will, what, just stop creating software? I understand people's apprehension because of the pace of change, but this is just silly.
You're overstating the case, but I think there's a strong possibility people will prompt AIs to produce bespoke apps that solve their niche use-case rather than paying a developer to do it.
I pay for a SaaS app that tracks my finances, but it's not that great and missing some features I would like. Very soon I expect I'll be able to get a better, local-first replacement tailored to my needs by prompting Claude & Friends.
There are two big advantages to using a 3rd party system.
1) There are a lot of cases where aggregated user data, even if anonymized, allows for insights that you can't get using just your own data.
2) The software is really just a stand in for a process. A way of doing something, like record keeping or tax filing, etc. A lot of times it makes sense to follow an already established process rather than creating your own. You are less likely to encounter unexpected pitfalls that way.
I don't see how you can overcome those just by having an AI that can build simple crud apps at will.
I think developers overestimate the amount of people who want to create app. My friends are lawyers, doctors, musicians, Pr, sales and they really dont care about creating their own apps or software. They use their iPhones for calls and Instagram.
I’m publishing a very simple app with very little human written code and so far 90% of the actual work has had nothing to do with development. Most of it has been the “business” stuff, especially since the app stores have a lot of compliance and setup requirements.
Your example of a financial app is perfect: maybe one day grandma will be able to vibecode a budget app but then how is she going to set up the integration with banks? Publish it to the App Store? Keep it updated with bug fixes and resolve security issues? Is the AI going to handle security and incident response too?
Maybe you’ll say that one day the AI will just handle all this automatically with zero input or setup, but I think we have to assume that we are still asking grandma to spend time writing down what she wants and interfacing with the AI a pretty substantial amount to get it finished.
The thing is, we are also talking about competing with a SaaS product that is already available for around $5/month, and the professional software developers working on that product also have access to AI (and a whole lot of other skills).
Even making grandma put in a few prompts here and there is going to result in enough wasted time to say “screw this, I’ll just pay $5 a month for Simplifi.”
He's wrong about SEO being the differentiator. Quality matters.
It's a huge trope to think your product didn't work for the market because the marketers beat you. I used to be that kind of developer until I made some products that people actually wanted.
But he's right that the software market is changing. Software will be easier to build and require less people to build it. So more, smaller companies will compete for market share. Margins will be cut and the consumers will get more of what they want for a lower price.
I think this is called a working market. It's what it looks like when capitalism actually works.
If you've ever tried to build something real with agentic AI, you know that it takes time. You can't (yet) snap your fingers and produce a fully market-viable clone of a SaaS product.
The specifics matter here. If you run a CRM for Dentists, can someone replicate your product in a weekend? I'm going to guess that dentists have some esoteric needs related to their CRM, and it's a little more complicated than an outsider might guess.
So what is the threat model? That a dentist is going to get fed up and try to DIY? I think you should encourage that, so they'll see what goes into it. That a 22 year old chooses "CRM for Dentists" as a thing to vibe-code over a weekend? Again, good luck with that.
I really dislike this SaaSocalypse fear mongering, because it's just not based in reality. Show me five examples of established SaaS companies being wiped out by vibe coding.
If dream of having a weekend-project turned $30k ARR SaaS is dead, good. It's an example of a tiny sliver of people losing their golden goose, so that everyone else in society can operate more efficiently.
One guy loses $2400/mo in revenue
200 pool cleaners can now easily track their clients filter change dates without paying $12/mo for a calendar script (something that 20 years ago would have been a one time $3 purchase).
I wish i could take back the view i gave to this article, it says nothing. Is there such a thing as an inverse hype machine? Where people take the opposite side of a hyped product and then hype that view just as much but for the same purpose? His footer even admits he's basically just trolling for views so he can reach the status of "thought leader".
btw, someone else having the same idea you have for a saas company has always been the case forever. Individuals taking shortcuts in quality to get to market faster has also been the case forever. There's nothing new about either of those two things.
I was struck that it was full of assertions and backed up by nothing. I suppose his clawdbot could have written it.
Exactly. If someone pitched you a book about a young kid who goes to a school of magic to learn how to use his powers, makes friends and enemies and ultimately battles evil, you might shoot down their dreams because "some cocaine-addled sales critter" already had that idea, and she's called J K Rowling and she's worth billions and shes so successful she can't even be cancelled because she makes so much money.
And yet, Patrick Rothfuss's The Name Of The Wind is the same concept, and sold over a million copes,
Lev Grossman's The Magicians is again the same concept, sold millions, and was adapted into a 5 season TV series for SyFy.
If anything, the success of an idea only leads to a bigger appetite for that idea.
Google was not the first search engine.
Thank you, it was time for my annual check on the status of Doors of Stone. Whelp. I wonder why LLMs don’t help such cases of writer’s block.
Ot to the article, but I just feel I need to strongly recommend The Hierarchy by James Islington.
It's pretty much the same idea as the above titles but omg it's so well written. Absolute must read!
oh thanks, I'll check that out!
BTW, The Magicians TV series might be the best thing SyFy ever made. It's got so much heart, it's properly funny, it's creative, it's epic despite a shoestring budget, and the characters stay with you long after you finish.
Agreed I loved it! Right up until they turned it into a musical for some reason. Me and my wife call it "doing a magicians" when a TV show suddenly starts singing for no reason.
But yeah up until that point it was great!
It's a whole thing. The Magicians was just following a trend that genre shows need a musical episode if they've been on long enough. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MusicalEpisode
Damn I had noticed a lot of series doing it, but I guess it's wider than I thought!
The Magicians overdid it though. It's not a musical episode, iirc it's like 2 seasons
Edit: just to be clear, I still watched those 2 entire seasons, because the story is genuinely that good, plus I was invested. But I really wish they hadn't gone musical, it really messed with the mood of the series.
> book about a young kid who goes to a school of magic to learn how to use his powers
Add to this the 50 bajillion manga/anime's with the exact same trope.
Is TNotW really the same concept as Harry Potter? It has a university in it, which I guess is similar to a school, and after a while the main character ends up there, but it's a very different concept - it's classic high fantasy that includes a period of learning and study, whereas HP is primarily boarding school fiction with magical elements. Similarly, The Magicians, as I understand it, is also more about a university, and is perhaps closer in lineage to Buffy or Charmed than to Harry Potter - it has more of that focus on the interpersonal relationships between characters, and a more complex morality.
The better comparison is probably with Percy Jackson, which isn't quite the same concept (being an American series, where boarding school fiction isn't quite as well-known a genre) but matches the ages, sense of discovery, and relationships to authority figures far better.
This isn't directly relevant to your point, but I really find it wild that people see two stories that have magic and a school in them and go "look, it's the same thing", especially when the genres and tropes of the two books are so utterly different. For that matter, Harry Potter is also nothing like Earthsea, which is another common reference point. I wonder if Americans just don't have as much experience with boarding school fiction to be able to categorise Harry Potter as a series?
> This isn't directly relevant to your point
Well, that kind of was exactly my point, although I feel now I didn't make it very clearly.
Someone might shoot down a prospective author who intends to write a book featuring a young protagonist getting a formal education in magic because it's "been done", but the resulting works are very different. It was a counterpoint to the article saying that we should not try to realise our ideas because someone somewhere has had "the same idea". They probably have had an idea which could be described in a similar fashion, but it doesn't really mean its the "same idea"
I probably stumbled a bit describing those books as the same concept when I should have put "same idea" in quotes
I think in that case, you're missing what the article is saying. It's not talking about building something new but not having people understand it. It's saying that anything new that you can build, someone else can build faster with AI.
To stretch the book analogy beyond breaking point, it would be like if Patrick Rothfuss released The Name of the Wind, and JK Rowling immediately put out "Harry Potter and the Kingkiller Chronicles, now with added Kvothe", and basically used her name and the Harry Potter brand to outcompete Rothfuss selling the same thing. (Obviously for books, you've got copyright, but there's no copyright for your favourite app idea.)
I think the extent to which that is actually true is hard to say, but I think it's a different point to the one you're arguing against here.
Your point came through clearly to me. Shared tropes or setting do not make identical stories and, in fact, often enhance them as a counterbalance or familiar thing to compare against.
A wise friend of mine once said, in regard to "ideas are nothing; execution is everything": you can tell a thousand artists to paint a portrait of an Italian woman with a countryside landscape behind her but, good or bad, none of them are the mona lisa.
Harry Potter has much better writing and morals than Percy Jackson. I had to stop reading Percy Jackson to my kids.
Scholomance but it’s highschool!
Every business has secrets. You don’t know why a business succeeds unless you know their edge. Looking at my SaaS you’d think you could copy it. And perhaps you could make something that looks the same. But you don’t know my secrets and there is no way I’m telling you. So you will never beat me
Never is a long time. Best of luck!
so, uh. What's your secret, then?
Crypto scams :-)
He's not telling
The whole premise is very unimaginative. It just takes one step on the infinite series and does not ask what the asymptote is (if there even is one).
If every coked up SDR can build a tech stack, then every junior SWE can get superhuman SEO.
If every product has superhuman seo and engineering, and there are 10 or 100x more products, then probably everyone uses the exact right one for their needs, and quality for your specific usecase is higher. (More competition means more quality, more of every differentiator, including lower prices. )
In a world of zero marginal cost of production (turning ideas into reality with a prompt), maybe it’s hard for anyone to eke out profit margin; I can’t see what anyone’s edge would be in this world. The end state here is much more disruptive than “dang, a coked up sdr out-competed me on my SaaS ide-“.
The edge is ownership - of GPUs, capital, connections and distribution channels (this includes SEO). Also, SEO will be meaningless if LLMs will be the main discovery channels. Much less transparent, and we are already seeing that, for example the "what about South African ***code" grok system prompt manipulation from a few months back.
Side projects don't die from lack of time. They die from success anxiety. Shipping means facing judgment. An eternal WIP stays safe in the "potential" zone where it can't disappoint anyone including yourself
Yep, that feels likely. When tech people don't ship, they overarchitect. Add all the stuff 'the big guys' have to Be Ready for the big time when you launch. And then never launch after spending 1000s on infrastructure, tools etc. I have done it, I see many people do it around me.
I'm going through this now. Once I start selling (hardware product), the cat is out of the bag, and further development becomes more difficult because there are paying customers. And we don't have the capacity to scale up if we "go viral". But AI has me pushing to do this somewhat prematurely because there's no guarantee I'll still be employed at the end of the year (due to "AI"), so the side project has to become a real thing right now.
> Quality is not a metric anyone cares about in 2026.
When you write operational critical code, it matters. No one can blame “the AI made me do it” when things go down and hundreds of thousands of people are without service.
When your code can hurt people, it matters. You can’t burn someone’s eye with a laser then point to some AI agent when lawsuits start flying in.
When millions of dollars in production data is lost or corrupted, who is responsible? Not AI. Quality matters.
I keep hearing this one phrase about code quality again and again. Sure, no one cares about the dumb little linter failing your builds, but when code quality comes to responsibility, it goes hand in hand. It’s either that or your all working on hobby projects.
I'm sure "bad quality" will soon be classified in the "cost of doing business" section like fines for not respecting laws.
That's why AI is hurting us so much right now.
We were always trying to have quality in our project, whether it was for readability or for code evolution.
No, Steve, you don't name your 42 variables with only two letter and no you don't use Norse mythology for naming servers in your infrastructure. Yes Odin is the most powerful so it's the production server but Tyr for the source control and print server isn't really obvious.
Well now AI is Steve.
It will create nice little 300 lines functions with a block repeating 6 times. You know that you will have 6 fix to make instead of one if this block was in a simple function.
It's not instinct a this point, is pure knowledge screaming "it's wrong".
And you now realise that the hidden strength from your craft wasn't about coding the best binary tree search algorithm, it was about knowing the underlying soft unknowns that really made it software.
We have a strong feeling that we're watching dozens of kids running with scissors and we don't know whether it's really scissors, we're just getting too old for this shit, or if we should just stop "progress" because we don't like it.
We're the horse breeders when everyone discovered cars.
> I'm sure "bad quality" will soon be classified in the "cost of doing business"
But that cost is not trivial. In some topics (but not limited) like medial devices, the legal liability would just bankrupt the company. Not so cheap compared to hiring a few humans. I’m picking an obvious cases here, but there are many others.
> Norse mythology for naming servers in your infrastructure
Ouch, yeah seen this a few times, outside of Scandinavia.
> thousands of people ... millions of dollars in production data
Doesn't sound like a hobby side project. Sounds like a business. And then yeah, you get all that comes with it.
As a Saas or tool company, you’re a manufacturer or maybe a wholesaler.
Your customers are paying you $1000 a month to handle a process that is worth $10k to them and might be worth $50k to their customers. If you lose that data you haven’t lost $1000 of data. Even if you only made $100 off of the transaction.
it was not clear enough, you need quality if you are running a business, the risk is too high in many cases
to be fair, the blog post is talking about personal side projects, not Lasik software.
for personal side projects of the "handy SAAS thing that gives all your JSON a lustrous sheen" variety, he's probably more on target that quality seems to have gone by the wayside.
I just sat on an enterprise onboarding call where their success engineer did in fact blame the AI and the client said "OK"
Not a good look lol.
Maybe it's wishful thinking, being one of the SaaS-developing developers he describes. But I think that only the complexity required for a SaaS is increasing. You certainly can't earn millions with the kind of SaaS that used to take a week or two, and can now be done on a weekend. So I am trying the kind of SaaS that I never dared to start, knowing that it would take a year or two of my spare time. And with AI agents, I now hope to complete it in 3 or 4 months, with a lot of extra features I would never have dared to include in an MVP.
do you want to tell us what it is?
A cloud-based RSS reader (like Google Reader, Feedly, Inoreader...).
What would distinguish your cloud-based RSS reader from the many other cloud-based RSS readers, both self-hosted as well as the others?
Mainly, a friendly and simple UI. Feedly looks like it hasn't gotten much love recently. Inoreader is too cluttered for my taste, though it has a feature set I can't match any time soon.
I have plenty of other ideas for what to build on top of it: offering an SDK and APIs so you can vibe-code the UI you want, a built-in podcast listener, using news from aggregated feeds to build a personalized AI feed. But the first step is to reach the Google Reader feature set minus social features.
I think you're in a tough market, but I'll agree that Feedly hasn't gotten much love, and is clearly aiming for a more enterprise market.
API access is worth chasing. There was something I wanted to do with Feedly (I've already forgotten what it was) but once I saw their APIs were hidden behind some enterprise level plan, that was the end of that. If we're in a world where everyone has a personal AI agent, giving their agent an API key to their RSS sync account... that might have some interest.
Feedly seems hostile to third-party client access (ie mobile & desktop apps), so being friendlier towards RSS clients could be of interest.
Personalized AI feed is a good idea but you don't have all the personalized year of context that my Claude does. My AI agent is (probably) going to do a better job of choosing the most relevant stuff.
And personally, less interested in podcasts in my RSS app. That's something for Pocket Casts / AntennaPod. I like my audio separate from my RSS. But that's me.
> I think you're in a tough market, but I'll agree that Feedly hasn't gotten much love, and is clearly aiming for a more enterprise market.
Yes, enterprise is certainly where the money is (Feedly's plans start at $1600/month...), but as a solo dev working on a side-project, that's not an accessible market for me anyway. So I try to create a service that's simple and cheap.
> My AI agent is (probably) going to do a better job of choosing the most relevant stuff.
The idea would be basically: the feed reader know the user's interests because of the subscriptions, and knows the last time the user logged in. So it can filter what happened since then; it can also order the posts by relevance, allowing the user to catch up. And in a second step, an agent could even write the posts dynamically, summarizing information gathered from the user's feed, possibly even adjusted to the user's level of knowledge and offering background info where needed.
> And personally, less interested in podcasts in my RSS app. That's something for Pocket Casts / AntennaPod. I like my audio separate from my RSS.
There are some feeds that are more like a mixture of text and podcast. I usually read only the text, but sometimes it catches my interest and I want to listen to one or two posts. That's when I start hating the lack of podcast support in Feedly.
Tough market. What’s your differentiator over Readwise? They are crushing it on the “power user feed reader”.
Best of luck though, I think this is a very promising space. (But my bet is you can do all the interesting stuff in vibe-coded thin UI + OSS pipeline.)
> What’s your differentiator over Readwise?
Simplicity. I can get you reading your first feed in under a minute. Also, I am not really thinking about monetization right now, but I am building a feed reader I want to use. I wouldn't want to spend $13 a month for it.
> thin UI + OSS pipeline
No, the UI isn't that thin. I am optimizing it to minimize my costs for operating it. Everything I can do inside the client is done inside the client. Interactions with the server are mostly limited to polling every 2 minutes for feed updates, and sending read markers after 3 seconds of inactivity. Feed data is stored on CDN, compressed.
I'm using (self-hosted) Nextcloud News, what would your... service? Tool? Product? ... offer beyond what NN does? It is quite simple as well, offers an uncluttered interface, keeps my subscriptions as private as RSS subscriptions can be. I suspect you're targeting a different market from the one catered by self-hosted services like Nextcloud?
I am not familiar with Nextcloud News. In the first version, it probably won't offer much for you, besides having a catalog of feeds, the ability to search them, and subscribe with one click, which is usually not offered by non-cloud RSS readers.
For people who do not want to use self-hosted services (which generally includes me), it offers simplicity. Open the page, choose Google as auth provider, confirm, and you will get a friendly start page. Click on 'follow' on one of the feeds, and you can start reading immediately. The UI is more like Facebook or X, so basically, you just need to scroll. Either in a feed of your choice, or all your feeds. It's designed to work well on small mobile screens, tablets, and desktops, with great keyboard support on the latter. Larger screens use two or three columns.
Nobody uses RSS… I thought you were going to say salesforce or something.
Then why is "everybody" so pissed about Google Reader being killed?
That's more in the range of dozens or even hundreds of conventional man-years.
Wat. RSS is back!
https://x.com/karpathy/status/2018043254986703167
sold :)
I got out of software and into physical products a couple of years ago. I wish I could say I was prescient, but honestly it's just so much easier to sell physical items.
Margins are worse, but selling is easier. If you've got a thing you can be sure that someone somewhere will give you money for it.
Kind of looks like vibecoding is doing to SaaS what Chinese mass manufacturing did to physical products two decades ago. Only the marketing and distribution matter in a world where it's very easy for others to clone something and sell it at a lower price.
> Only the marketing and distribution matter in a world where it's very easy for others to clone something and sell it at a lower price
Great point. AI remixes and rips-off existing code-bases in a manner that is impossible to attribute copyright violation making it legal. ie, Perfect cloning. In a world where cloning is legal, the engineering cost of product drops to zero. That is where software production could be headed. What remains is marketing/distribution/sales.
There will remain niches solving "hard problems" which cant be cloned, but those will be rare. Hard problems are where a lot of engineering complexity resides, involving interacting components for which there are no examples in training datasets to copy from. For example, a complex distributed system or hardware with multiple nuanced tradeoffs.
> Only the marketing and distribution matter
Don't forget liability & compliance :)
And yet people can still make money producing and selling high quality physical products. It's a smaller market but there are people who don't want mass produced chinese crap and they go out of their way to find it.
There will be people who will pay for "human coded" software if it is better. Quality is always a differentiator that some people will pay for.
What kind of physical products and what kind of customers?
airtite.shop
Stuff for old men like me
But… distribution is so much harder?
There's legions of companies that will do warehousing and shipping for you. Definitely costs though.
That's what I mean by margins being a significant difference.
A friend of mine dabbles in niche hardware products. The amount of work he has to put in to get the CE and other certifications is significant. That’s before assembly, shipping (including customs shenanigans) and… returns. For a software guy like me, digital products seem much less daunting… and of course they scale “perfectly”. Nice smokers though, must be nice to earn money from something like that, congrats!
Well, you're like then opposite version of me :D I was into physical products and services most of my life, and from recently I'm just trying to create stuff that can be sold digitally :D Still not there, but slowly getting to it.
I always got the impression that the only way a relatively average software developer could make a “successful” SaaS is if they built something weird and niche that appeals to an audience of <1000 paying customers. In that sense, it doesn’t really matter if your competition is better at SEO since your competition never even thought to build something like this, never cared, and not to mention that the market for this thing is so small that SEO is arguably a wasted skill. You’ll need to acquire these people by finding them directly or through word of mouth.
This blog post seems to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of solo-developer SaaS, but then again arguably mostly software developers also fundamentally misunderstand it.
This vibes with me, though I think it's overly glum.
You can't hope to succeed by building something cool without distribution already figured out. If you haven't put the work in building a social following, you're pretty much locked into pay to play (which isn't horrible if you target small targeted bloggers/youtubers/etc, but it's not my bag). OpenClaw exploded because Peter has >100k twitter followers and among them are plenty of people who themselves have a ton of followers.
So, if you're building, you also need to focus on building an audience.
The high touch enterprise sales strategy is solid though, and easier to bootstrap. That's why Alex Hormozi and Dan Martell push people getting started that way.
I think what is left is that understanding pain points and knowing what problems needs solved is more important now than ever. If anyone can create a product now then the one who knows what product to actually create is the winner. And who might this be? Well it might just be the people who spent the last 10 years speaking to customers, building a SaaS. They have 10 years of taking to customers finding out what to build. Even if they were to start from scratch today they already have the requirements in their pocket.
The game has change. The ‘how’ we build it is easy. The ‘what’ we build is and always has been the hardest part of any SaaS or business.
> The game has change. The ‘how’ we build it is easy. The ‘what’ we build is and always has been the hardest part of any SaaS or business.
This is what the promptfondlers don't want to admit: the how has been easy for a long time. This last, I dunno, 35 years or so, Visual Basic, Delphi, whatnot, producing code has been very easy. You don't need a fundamentally fascist probabilistic nightmare to do it. The hard problems are indeed is "what" to build and how we maintain it. There's only hype. There's no results. https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware...
As for fascism, check https://blog.bgcarlisle.com/2025/05/16/a-plausible-scalable-... for example
> By “fascist” in this context, I mean that it is well suited to centralizing authority, eliminating checks on that authority and advancing an anti-science agenda.
Or check Woodrow Hartzog & Jessica Silbey, How AI Destroys Institutions , 77 UC Law Journal (2026). Available at: https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/faculty_scholarship/4179
> This last, I dunno, 35 years or so, Visual Basic, Delphi, whatnot, producing code has been very easy
I’m not so sure about that. It’s very easy to take your own knowledge for granted. Most people can’t do what we do. Most of my customers couldn’t even express what they wanted.
> Most of my customers couldn’t even express what they wanted.
And AI doesn't help with that. At all. This is the part where I said figuring out what to build is hard.
Exactly. Software development is 20% of what your average software developer does. Figuring out what to build is a skill some don’t even realise they are doing every day, and it’s an incredibly valuable skill.
SaaS let's you simply pay to make blockers go away. Now that our time is more high leverage, why wouldn't you continue to do that?
Let's say you could vibe your own replacement to a $20/month app in 16 hours. Congratulations, you did work valued at an $15/hour less token expenses (over 1 year).
> Listen: every idea you've ever had, every single one, some cocaine-addled sales critter has had too. And they're better than you at SEO.
On most days I am resistant to stereotypes about "the welfare state" eroding incentives for entrepreneurism and innovation. But if you're going to wave it in my face like that, I might have to reconsider.
> Listen: every idea you've ever had, every single one, some cocaine-addled sales critter has had too.
You can test this, if you talk about your idea to three people and one of them says we're already doing that and the other two think you're insane, you'd be safe.
“Quality is not a metric” is the core argument here.
I say the only way to build a successful long term product is by focusing on quality, ESPECIALLY when the competition is shitting out crap.
Quality buys you user retention/longevity. You can't retain users you don't have though, and getting users now is brutal.
Features get users, but features introduce complexity, bugs, technical debt, and maintenance expenses.
More so this complexity requires that you have support for your users, and QA of weird functional interactions across systems boundaries that you just can't test for when actually writing the code.
This gets expensive really fast.
Complex software is hard, yo.
Getting users was always brutal
I totally agree here. AI coding is raising the ceiling in terms of code quantity, but it also lowers the floor on quality, right into the sewer.
Fortunately experienced developers are in the best position to use these tools properly, evaluate what works and what doesn't. We might drown in slop first though.
The author seems to be complaining about the fact that you can't make a pet hobby project succeed purely out of technical excellence. First of all welcome to the club: musicians and artists and people of taste have long lived with the constant pain of watching the majority of people consume crap. Secondly: it's not true that products cannot succeed on the basis of pure technical excellence. Figma, TigerBeetle, and much software of the highest class have won the market on the basis of technical excellence, and it's the kind of thing amateurs with AI will never be able to build. You need to find an audience with a real problem and then produce a technically superior solution that an amateur with AI cannot.
Entering the SaaS market is dead because the market is saturated with mature products, not due to anything AI related. I've watched people try and enter the market we're in and fail because they can't build enough product to take any market share from anyone else.
Build something else!
The "elda för kråkorna" metaphor is perfect. I've watched three side projects in my circle get undercut by AI-generated clones with better SEO within weeks of launch. The uncomfortable truth is that the moat for small SaaS was never the code — it was distribution, and that game has completely changed.
>Yours actually works and is higher quality, because you know about things like TTFP and INP and "not putting your Supabase god-token in the client"? Oh, you sweet summer child: I take no pleasure in this but I need to tell you that these things don't matter anymore. Quality is not a metric anyone cares about in 2026.
Quality will matter the most in 2026. Specifically because the barrier-to-entry for making software is down there will of course be a lot of poor quality software, which will break, expose customer data, be bloated, etc. Customers will have more options, and this will allow them to be more discerning. Open source, clean code, low dependencies...these are things that can be evaluated by HN crowd types, but it's also something that an LLM can evaluate.
We are entering into an age of software taste. For those of us that have developed taste over the years, we become the taste makers in that we care how things are built, and know what we're looking for. This applies on the supply side, when our taste drives the LLM, and on the consumption side, when we can help the masses evaluate what to use and what not to use.
NB: this is all speculation expressed as fact, in keeping with the OP's style.
It already happened mostly outside the AI slop; only if you have marketing money you will succeed and your clients usually cannot distinguish bad from good; if you have VC money and 1B$ valuation you must be doing something right no?
I walk into products being garbage and basically broken (upgrade bottom doesn't work, email always broken, support form goes to dev null etc) and most products I try are b2b and many are enterprise SaaS.
Only yesterday, I am in the EU, I wanted to try out some enterprise software of a company with VC money valuated at billions, so I signed up for a demo which needed me to validate my email. But that email didn't arrive. I tried with 4 different addresses (different providers including google and ms): nothing. So I forgot about it and went on with my day; hours later, 1 hour after the west coast US woke up, I got all 4 emails with expired links. So I guess while sleeping, their system was broken. No worries, things happen, but they happen all the time and it doesn't matter how much money they have. They also often just refuse to fix things because why would they.
I threw out Canva because they refuse to fix fundamental issues and keep blaming the customers or play dumb 'oh we never saw this happen!' while you can just do a search and find heaps of people having the same issues. etc. Quality does not matter, at all. Deep marketing pockets do.
Just like the tide of fast fashion caused people to seek out local-sewn clothes made from high-quality materials, right? Right?
Quality isn’t a differentiator if the market is saturated with indistinguishable garbage. Everything is made in sweatshops out of the cheapest plastic available, and I don’t see why software isn’t next in line.
Actually: There’s been a noticeable uptick in the last decade+ of better-made clothing for shoppers who are open to paying somewhat higher prices. Not boutique prices, but also more expensive than H&M.
For a long time the stereotypical “young professional” look was tied closely to just a few mainstream retailers (Banana Republic for example), but over the last ~15 years a wider range of smaller or more specialized brands has entered the space: Alex Mill, Spier and Mackay, etc.
But even ignoring that your analogy doesn’t quite fit since price plays a significant role in clothing purchasing decisions: Fast fashion succeeds largely because it is cheap.
If reasonably priced, higher-quality alternatives were accessible people would buy them. It’s partly why certain brands have grown in popularity (Carhartt, for example).
Exactly - it turns into a market for lemons, where the customer is unwilling to make a bet or even invest in an evaluation if there's an overwhelming amount of crap and little ability to differentiate. Amazon is turning into this with QWENFOING everything.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
Yeah it actually did do this for me. I will not purchase new clothing at all unless I have some understanding of the supply chain and where it was made, with a strong preference for clothes that are at least cut and sewn in the US. I won’t tolerate buying clothes, or really any textile product, if I can’t be relatively certain it will last me at least five years. A flood of cheap, unreliable shit did actually make me more discerning.
N of 1, obviously, but this isn’t as outlandish as you wanted to make it seem here.
Well, the affordable luxury segment has done quite well over the last couple of decades.
> Customers will have more options, and this will allow them to be more discerning.
Lets assume this is true - how on earth are they to determine that your code doesn't have any glaring security holes but the 2h vibe-coded app has more holes than the Swiss is able to put into their cheese[1]?
I really want to know how customers can tell the difference between very pretty crap and your stuff?
-------------
[1] Yeah, I know it doesn't work like that.
Yep, choice can paralyze.
What these customers are going to do is do a summary discard of almost all the choices but say 3 to 5 and go from there.
The problem is now how to be consistently on that top list. And that's marketing's problem.
You may be right about taste, but I think it takes a different dimension in the future.
"Dear Claude, please make me a clone of <fancy new saas> but make <these changes specific to my tastes>".
For many things, it's probably not "select the one of 100 that fits my taste", it's probably going to be to just make your own personal version that fits your taste in the first place. And, probably, never share that anywhere.
Someone needs a hug. Honestly I've started writing only to realize how much code output will be wasted over the next hour or two, so I just go back to coding the amazing product I'm working on with amazing agents, that would simply not be possible if I didn't have access to the AI tools I'm using. It's going to make many humans profoundly more safe. I'm very excited. I hope you are excited about your project too.
Has OP been at a company where sales people do this? I have, and I can tell you they have not gotten far.
There was one PM at my ex-job that showed a dashboard for... well... i honestly didnt understand. I think it was some uptime checks. It broke during his presentation.
There's a company I hired at that "built an ERP in 5 days and is shipping the product in June". Same thing happened, it broke when presenting. Basic feature suggestions just returned a "Yes, we can do that!" (they meant they can tell Claude to do it, not that the product could do it).
Maybe at some point non-engineers can prompt build, but for now I'd say we're pretty safe. I think engineers give themselves too little credit. Being able to read code is an amazing tool that can only be sharpened through skill.
Lastly, I think I commented this ~2 years ago as well. If your product is vibe-codable and is replacing customers, it's a shit product. Similarly, if you can outsource your product on fiverr, its's a shit product.
I wonder what the game dev side has been like with agentic coding. Starting a project from scratch is usually a boring task, so I wonder if
- making a markdown file with all specs, details and plans - asking claude to search online and suggest some approaches
is a better alternative to doing the research yourself.
I haven't had much success using LLM's in Unity as there is a lot of work that goes into the editor and cannot be done via code, especially if you are using several different assets
> "If Mastodon's not your jam, maybe star one of my GitHub repos. It's really the least you can do."
I like his sense of humour.
On the flipside, there are a lot of businesses that don't open their digital product to multiple markets or verticals because the cost (in money or focus) is too high. Distribution just got a lot easier, arguably about as easy as it should have been in the first place. If you already have a reasonable moat for your product in a smallish market, going broad is a lot more feasible now. I'm doing it now (with partners who own the core product) and its going very well.
I mean just because it's easier to write software doesn't mean you can't have success building a business around software. You'll just need to build more features at a higher level of quality. When everyone has access to these tools the net effect will just be to elevate the overall quality of software which is good for everyone.
I think a lot of opportunities are closing. But I also think a lot of new ones are being created. Pretty much impossible to predict. AI may end up being like "the bomber will always get through": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_bomber_will_always_get_thr...
I don't disagree with the sentiment, but it's a depressing take to say that the best approach for self-preservation is to latch hard onto corporate
I feel like that isn't even anything new, most businesses have worked like that for a long time. It's much more straightforward to be a supplier for a few big clients than to be a B2C. We just don't hear about them as often because of their nature.
> And they're better than you at SEO
Based on Louis Rossmann's rant 3 days ago [1], it seems Gemini has got you covered on that front too.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uKZ84zwJI0
It was never easy after ~2010.
AI can self direct SEO pretty good, hate to be the bearer of bad news.
ok, but then to support him he suggests starring one of his github repos, isn't that just throwing out some breadcrumbs for the crows using his analogy?
If I understand it, the premise of this article is that because the marginal cost of software production is now free, now nobody can compete against garbage quality code sold by the slickest "sales critter", so everyone should just give up.
I mean, it seems at the very least, that open source and in-house production has a natural advantage here? If the marginal cost of software production is now free, then FOSS/in-house just got easier to create and maintain too. Does that make it easier for FOSS/in-house, both available without a subscription to an external third party, undermine "sales critter" SAAS, by the author's own premises?
> now nobody can compete against garbage quality code sold by the slickest "sales critter", so everyone should just give up.
Isn't that just SAP, er, I mean SAAS as it has been for a decade?
> What's that you're saying? Yours actually works and is higher quality, because you know about things like TTFP and INP and "not putting your Supabase god-token in the client"? Oh, you sweet summer child: I take no pleasure in this but I need to tell you that these things don't matter anymore. Quality is not a metric anyone cares about in 2026.
That's funny and all but it can't really be true that quality doesn't matter. It has to matter at some point. Maybe it doesn't matter during the initial sales cycle; I've seen it happen: the CEO sees a slick demo that works, every user / developper rolls their eyes and try to warn them, they don't listen, and the deal is done.
But eventually if the thing that's supposed to be done, isn't, something will have to give. Even if at first they fire all the eye-rollers and replace them with obedient corporate drones, if the think isn't working and it's on the critical path, it will have to be replaced by something that actually does work.
I think the realistic take is to treat SaaS products like any other extremely skewed distribution, like income in sports.
Most people will barely make anything, some will be able to supplement their income, very few will be able to make a living. Even less will become "rich". For every product that blows up, there are thousands that will barely make anything.
But of course, it all depends on what your product does. If you make the millionth TODO / GenAI image editor / food calculator app and hope to make some money, good luck.
Meanwhile, in the Silicon Valley: “OpenAI should build Slack” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47012553
Yes, a very hyped mega-corp should be building and replacing all productivity software; why leave room for competitors when a single company can do it all? What can go wrong?
This is the kind of thing that anyone could have said at any time in history. Sure, it’s easier now to solve the kinds of problems that were hard a few years ago, but that just brings whole classes of previously “impossible” problems into the merely “hard” category. We’re just finding out what those are now, and if you can figure one out there’s money to be made.
You can only change the rules, you can never stop The Game™. Now, more than ever before, it's faster and easier to create something and deliver its perceived value at scale. Nerds used to rule the roost of tech because they were willing to invest the time and toil in obscurity. Now that's no longer the case. The only skill you need to have now is sales and showmanship. A chatbot can do the rest.
So nobody will ever start another successful software project? People will, what, just stop creating software? I understand people's apprehension because of the pace of change, but this is just silly.
You're overstating the case, but I think there's a strong possibility people will prompt AIs to produce bespoke apps that solve their niche use-case rather than paying a developer to do it.
I pay for a SaaS app that tracks my finances, but it's not that great and missing some features I would like. Very soon I expect I'll be able to get a better, local-first replacement tailored to my needs by prompting Claude & Friends.
There are two big advantages to using a 3rd party system.
1) There are a lot of cases where aggregated user data, even if anonymized, allows for insights that you can't get using just your own data.
2) The software is really just a stand in for a process. A way of doing something, like record keeping or tax filing, etc. A lot of times it makes sense to follow an already established process rather than creating your own. You are less likely to encounter unexpected pitfalls that way.
I don't see how you can overcome those just by having an AI that can build simple crud apps at will.
I think developers overestimate the amount of people who want to create app. My friends are lawyers, doctors, musicians, Pr, sales and they really dont care about creating their own apps or software. They use their iPhones for calls and Instagram.
That's kind of me. I have never purchased an app for my phone. I use what it came with: phone calls, imessage, maps, browser. That's all I need.
I doubt it.
I’m publishing a very simple app with very little human written code and so far 90% of the actual work has had nothing to do with development. Most of it has been the “business” stuff, especially since the app stores have a lot of compliance and setup requirements.
Your example of a financial app is perfect: maybe one day grandma will be able to vibecode a budget app but then how is she going to set up the integration with banks? Publish it to the App Store? Keep it updated with bug fixes and resolve security issues? Is the AI going to handle security and incident response too?
Maybe you’ll say that one day the AI will just handle all this automatically with zero input or setup, but I think we have to assume that we are still asking grandma to spend time writing down what she wants and interfacing with the AI a pretty substantial amount to get it finished.
The thing is, we are also talking about competing with a SaaS product that is already available for around $5/month, and the professional software developers working on that product also have access to AI (and a whole lot of other skills).
Even making grandma put in a few prompts here and there is going to result in enough wasted time to say “screw this, I’ll just pay $5 a month for Simplifi.”
He's wrong about SEO being the differentiator. Quality matters.
It's a huge trope to think your product didn't work for the market because the marketers beat you. I used to be that kind of developer until I made some products that people actually wanted.
But he's right that the software market is changing. Software will be easier to build and require less people to build it. So more, smaller companies will compete for market share. Margins will be cut and the consumers will get more of what they want for a lower price.
I think this is called a working market. It's what it looks like when capitalism actually works.
This could be the end of enshitification.
We really need a downvote button on blog posts
If you've ever tried to build something real with agentic AI, you know that it takes time. You can't (yet) snap your fingers and produce a fully market-viable clone of a SaaS product.
The specifics matter here. If you run a CRM for Dentists, can someone replicate your product in a weekend? I'm going to guess that dentists have some esoteric needs related to their CRM, and it's a little more complicated than an outsider might guess.
So what is the threat model? That a dentist is going to get fed up and try to DIY? I think you should encourage that, so they'll see what goes into it. That a 22 year old chooses "CRM for Dentists" as a thing to vibe-code over a weekend? Again, good luck with that.
I really dislike this SaaSocalypse fear mongering, because it's just not based in reality. Show me five examples of established SaaS companies being wiped out by vibe coding.
If dream of having a weekend-project turned $30k ARR SaaS is dead, good. It's an example of a tiny sliver of people losing their golden goose, so that everyone else in society can operate more efficiently.
One guy loses $2400/mo in revenue
200 pool cleaners can now easily track their clients filter change dates without paying $12/mo for a calendar script (something that 20 years ago would have been a one time $3 purchase).