Hacker News Reader

Comment by TrackerFF | Hacker News Reader

At which point the question will be: What are even the customers paying for? If they can get the product / service straight from their own chatbots, why pay a company for it? The companies that sell data, will probably somewhat safe - as long as they can have some moat between the users and data.

The death of SaaS could also be a thing in the (not so distant) future.

View on HN

I’m planning out my 2030 career in idle moments these days. I think it’ll be something akin to a carpenter who builds custom furniture.

I think we’ve barely scratched the surface of what software can do if it’s completely custom built, specifically for individuals or small businesses who could’ve never afforded it, pre-ai. Home automation, health and disease management, all sorts of administration, conversational ai over your life’s data - most people have no clue what’s possible once it’s custom built. With close attention, good design, creativity, and without giving away privacy or independence.

In my limited spare time I’m building up this tapestry of custom services for myself and my loved ones, and having a great time doing it, while trying to learn how I can offer this as a service.

Judging by the reactions I get when showing people what I can do with my phone, and no that’s not available on Google play, I think the demand will be there.

Woodworking and making furniture is fun! However, having made both furniture (and ceramics) myself - I think it’s hard to make a living this way. The overwhelming majority of people are used to paying little for these kinds of things. In the case of woodworking a large piece of furniture can take months so you might expect to only produce 3-4 / year unless you’re very good.

Not to say you shouldn’t! But it’s worth being realistic about income compared to (current) software salaries.

Sure. But you're taking my metaphor farther than I intended. Most people understand the basics of furniture, and still prefer to pay Ikea rather than a carpenter. In the case of custom ("bespoke", ugh) software, we'll have to both define and communicate a new category of service. And the customers are likely to be the same sorts of people who will pay a personal trainer or get a private tutor for their kids - and I think that includes a lot more people than are willing to pay for custom furniture. But generally I do agree, this vision is far more hand-wavy than concrete at this point. It is, though, a good time for hand-waving right now.

Ah I misunderstood your original comment then. I took it more literally as you eventually will become a carpenter (after software)

>The death of SaaS could also be a thing in the (not so distant) future.

I suspect outsourcing is the first thing on the chopping block. Why bother with different timezones, cultures and languages when you can get your AI to do the same thing for less money.

Also the companies with leadership who bias towards outsourcing for cost cutting reasons, will 100% happily automate any Indian folk too.

Consumers are unlikely to want to build their own software even if it's "easy" with AI. It doesn't really make sense to spend all that time vibe coding instead of paying $10/month for most people.

Businesses are more likely to build than buy, yes, but as we know from "Theory of the Firm" there are limits to this, it's not going to be correct to build _everything_.

So I mainly expect it to change what type of software gets sold, not the fact that it gets sold in the first place.

There's a lot of saas that costs a whole lot more than $10 a month and doesn't work exactly the way you'd want it to. Then it becomes very tempting to vibe code your own

most customers aren't paying for software at all

Restaurants exist despite grocery stores selling ingredients. Thing is, I need to eat every day and food goes bad. Software that I need to use doesn't decay in the same way.

I think we're looking at the end of commodity software, the end of software companies, and birth of every single company writing their own everything. A proprietary soup everywhere, and 1-2 100X developers overseeing it all. And those few developers will spend their time in communications tutorials to get the staff to be able to explain what they want and need, so they can then make it happen for that company's exclusive use.

It just doesn't really make financial sense, a lot of software is not a significant cost to many companies. For example my company pays something like $50/month for newsletter sending software. We could easily vibe code an alternative but why bother? $50 is a rounding error in our business costs, even a single bug or outage in the replacement would make it a terrible decision.

On the other hand if you're a business with 50k employees and you have to pay $10/seat for something that's a much more compelling case to build in house (but then it always was). So maybe with vibe coding it drops the cutoff to a lower number?

Or commodity software companies that are small and experts and creating AI custom solutions extremely quickly

Accountability. Suppose you had the ability to have robotically built highway bridges. Who is going to sign off on the work? Who is going to be held accountable? The same with software. The people who don't like to write software today aren't going to suddenly develop a love for deep testing and validation.

And now we are controlling models that can be hacked in so many different ways and literally blow up companies. It used to be accountability the software wouldn’t break. Now it’s accountability that in creating the software we don’t ruin the business.

if AI can kill SaaS, what limit the blast radius to only software. In theory any job that you can do on computer, AI should be able to do that as well.

And with the advance of robotic, what would we even do ?

> In theory any job that you can do on computer, AI should be able to do that as well.

It can, however, currently the issue is that sufficient intimate knowledge is required, and just a large complex code base and/or documentation is insufficient. However, intermediate representations to bridge the gap are on the way.

I mean, the same reason they do now. Time, taste, and amortized costs.

Just because it's faster and cheaper and requires less skill, doesn't mean it's instant and free and requires no skill.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com