Right, there are dozens of open source versions of wikis/task trackers/CRMs/ERPs/whatevers. Just because you can vibecode your way to a bad version of a bunch of SaaS products shouldn't fundamentally change anything. Companies buy SaaS products to make running the thing someone else's problem. It's times like these where I wish we had a functional SEC; I really wonder how much market manipulation is going on.
Yeah, agreed, but it was at least part of the moat. Competitors can see the model, the approach to market, etc. They still had to code up a better product.
And part of the problem that the SaaS solves is that "I have this thing that I need to do. I can probably do it in software, but I don't know how. Can I buy that software?". Which is now becoming "Can I get an LLM to do it?" instead.
That’s where the “free as in puppy” comes in. It’s still a classic case of build vs buy, except building is now quicker than it used to be. You still have to ask, “suppose I did build it myself. Then what?”
Yeah. So then you get your own product, tailor-made to your organisation, that you own (well, it's public domain because LLM-generated, but same same), and that you can change whenever you want without having to deal with a SaaS company's backlog. If you don't like something in it, you fire up Claude Code and get it changed.
There's also no danger of it being enshittified. Or of some twat of a product manager deciding to completely change the UI because they need to change something to prove their importance. Or of the product getting cancelled because it's not making enough money. Or of it getting sold to an evil corp who then sells your data to your competition. Or any of the other stupid shit we've seen SaaS companies pull over the past 20 years.
Respectfully, I think you’re only considering upsides and not considering downsides, opportunity costs, and ongoing maintenance costs. This is not what smart managers do. Plus, just because you can build something cheaper with an LLM doesn’t mean you can operate it more cheaply than a specialist can. Economies of scale haven’t been obviated by AI.
It’s useful to take an argument and take it to its logical extreme: I just don’t see every company in the world, large and small alike, building everything they depend on in-house, as though they were a prepper stocking up for Armageddon. That seems pretty fanciful on its face.
As an attorney (and this is not legal advice), I would argue--and the U.S. Copyright Office has already stated--that machine-generated content is not copyrightable, because it's not a form of human creative expression. https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell... ("Copyright does not extend to purely AI-generated material, or material where there is insufficient human control over the expressive elements.")
That said, the inquiry doesn't there. What happens next after the content is generated matters. If human creativity is then applied to the output such that it transforms it into something the machine didn't generate itself, then the resulting product might be copyrightable. See Section F on page 24 of the Report.
Consider that a dictionary contains words that aren't copyrightable; but the selection of words an author select to write a novel constitutes a copyrightable work. It's just that in this case, the author is creatively constructing from much larger components than words.
Lots of questions then obviously follow, like how much and what kind of transformation needs to be applied. But I think this is probably where the law is headed.
Can the output of the service be licensed? A bit like the AGPL, you're licensed to use/reuse/derive new works.
So if it's distributed outside of the license, that's subject to contractual penalties? I guess that's what all the "wrapper" SaaS businesses will do.
Read that report, it defined the issues and the boundaries well, for the current generation of AI tools. As they develop and expand, it's going to get interesting, especially if robotics/3d printing etc get involved.
If I use an Optimus Prime to help create art, similar to Andy Warhol's "factory", do I own the copyright on the completed work?
If a person uses AI to generate work that ends up being patentable, are patents also not available?
I feel like a lot of people are about to learn this lesson for the first time. Except in some very niche areas the majority of the value was never the code. The SaaSs that everyone thinks will be replaced had much more than code if they were successful -integrations, contracts, expertise, reputation, etc…
Sometimes, but I think there are some SaaS products whose business model is really under threat. Look at PagerDuty. Their PE ratio is like 4.4. They have a lot of existing customers but virtually no pricing power now and I imagine getting new business for them is extremely difficult.
Canva is my go-to example - you can just get NanoBanana/whatever to generate and iterate on the image. Same for all those stock photo services. I used to use them a lot, now I just generate blog images
Very cool. I would've used this a lot in a past life. It's interesting how many different ways there are to manage cron jobs, too. I've seen:
Place 1: Cron jobs edited on the box via vim, and every night they're scraped and off there are diffs, they're committed. Kind of like reverse management. It was actually a pretty elegant solution for the environment it was in, where devs just could not be convinced to not just edit the crontab directly.
Place 2: no cron jobs, it's all either airflow tasks or a bespoke managed clustering cron-like thing.
Place 3: all k8s scheduled job pods, conceptually the same but somehow less enjoyable.
Honestly I liked the airflow version the best, python is just better than bash, and often cron jobs end up developing dependencies anyway. Plus Python lets you wire in many niceties.
Idk, habit and the devil you know are powerful as hell. Google has enshittified search nearly beyond imagination, but it's still where the vastly overwhelming majority of people search.
What free search engine today performs significantly better? No seriously Google sucks and I want an alternative. Do I need to pay for Kagi to get decent search?
You’re still missing the key point: Hedge funds and REITs aren’t arbitrarily buying housing at any cost.
They are responding to the market. If they overbuy then they will lose money and have to sell at a loss, at which point you could snap up some good deals.
This is ridiculously oversimplified, because there is no real market in housing. It is illegal to build in all of the places people want to buy. The purchase of housing by hedge funds isn't a problem on its own, it's simply a symptom of the bigger problem of supply restrictions.
The funds themselves say in their financials that they view housing as profitable because of the various restrictions on supply in every desirable city. They explicitly say that if those restrictions were lifted they would not be able to make money in that business and they would exit.
Any attempt to apply supply and demand and market theoreticals in housing is fundamentally misplaced, as the other commenter noted, because there are far too many forces that distort both supply and demand.
Top philanthropists include Jamsetji Tata (donated $102.4 billion), Bill and Melinda Gates ($75.8 billion), Warren Buffett (is pledging to donate 99% of his wealth). Andrew Carnegie gave away 85% of his wealth -- including construction of over 2,500 public libraries.
Carnegie did that to white wash his public opinion while he worked his workers non stop and to mutilation or death. When are you going to the library when you work 996 or more?
While I hope Warren Buffet isn't cut from the same cloth, the odds are looking quite bad. It would be nice to know there are some out there who can just be smart, get rich, and then NOT damn your immortal soul. But it's looking grim.
Only one billionaire has ever given away enough money while he was alive to not be a billionaire. Ever. Pledges don't count. Also Warren Buffet giving away 99% of his wealth still keeps him a billionaire.
Because most people who are not some combination of the above tap out somewhere around the $100m-$500m mark or earlier, because they don't have any reason to get more.
If you accept cancer as a death sentence, you're an idiot. I had cancer at age 41. If I left it untreated, sure I'd be dead, probably by age 43. But I'm not an idiot, I had good health insurance, I was treated, and now that health event is over twenty years in the past.
Had I self-funded with a (non-existent) nest egg, I would still be in debt over $600k. Instead, my insurance had to deal with that...
600k once in 40 years is cheap compared to the total cost of insurance, especially when you consider the compound interest you could have made on premiums not paid, plus with the freedom to get cancer care cheaper someplace privately outside the US.
Your insurance company got the last laugh by a long shot. A typical family on insurance would pay $600,000 (between their take-home and the reduced wages paid by employers to cover insurance) in just 25 years, and that's before considering the opportunity cost of lost investments/yield.
Are you really suggesting that a family should not have insurance at all and save the money?
I have been working for 30 years and have never once paid more than $10K a year for insurance across 10 jobs 15 of those years were a family plan.
Hell one of those jobs was with Amazon - the company with the shittiest benefit package in all of BigTech and even then I only $12K with a family plan. Right now we pay around $10K - my wife myself and my adult but under 26 (step)son
You've likely paid at least $18k if not more like $25k for that insurance in the form of wage income moved to benefit income. The government's tax and regulatory environment post WWII just ensures that unless you choose to take it as 1099 income, your potential 1099 income gets reflected in reduced W2 wages that are paid out in benefits.
You might claim that if your employer didn't offer that benefit they'd just pay nothing, but required health benefits function much as payroll taxes which economists have showed are largely reflected in the form of reduced incomes. That is, you are paying it ~all one way or another.
My annual premium for insurance was roughly $2400/year. Since then, it's gone to about $6k per annum. Even compounded at whatever the S&P500 returns for a 40 year interval, I'm pretty sure I'm ahead of the game. If you think I've lost $600K by having work provided insurance, we're not dealing with the same level of reality.
I stopped cataloging the invoices after it hit $1.6M. Granted that's what the providers would bill my insurance, and we all know those are funny numbers, and while I'm sure that a concentrated effort to negotiate cheaper cash prices might have been productive, there's still the fact that I would have had to have $600k or so readily available. HYSA yields were pretty low for most of this time period, and if I had kept that kind of money in a stock portfolio, taxes would have killed me.
And it's beside the point. 99% of Americans can't afford to build a $600k nest egg just to cover medical expenses. THAT'S WHAT INSURANCE IS FOR!
Also, I wonder if this is skewed by more affordable treatments for things like basal cell carcinoma or prostate cancer that doesn't require surgical intervention. In my case, I had full on chemo, rad treatment, surgery, and more chemo. Wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy, but I'm sure as hell glad I had good insurance. Dealing with the medical side was traumatic enough, I don't think I or anyone in my family had the bandwidth to deal with negotiating cash deals with multiple providers.
It cost $30k for a loved one just to go to the hospital when their heart "felt weird" but absolutely nothing turned out to be wrong and all they did was run a couple quick scans and tests. I do agree with the overall idea of what you're saying that usually the premiums are way more than what you could get care for if you just saved the money, but the numbers on the website seem very wrong. I realize it's a total anecdote but from loved one's bills it is $20-30k just to get in the door and that is if actually nothing is wrong and there is no heart attack yet they're quoting $30k for an actual heart attack care.
This is one of the most insane things that I have realized... I have terrible insurance (in case), but I generally don't present it as it is much cheaper and faster to pay cash...
I think we can all agree that the current system is just... ridiculous
I used to be fearful of health concerns, but now I'm a carnivore and just feel great.
I have never in my 30 year career paid more than $10K a year for health care across 10 jobs and that’s including working at Amazon with their shitty benefit package
In my 15 year career, I have never paid less than $10k per year for just me and my wife for health insurance. And I basically try to pick the most sensible and affordable option, not luxury plans.
In the last 15 years I’ve worked for: General Electric when it was still a F10 company and more recently Amazon along with a 60 person startup where the family plan was $150 a month. (2018-2020) and two mid size companies in between and now I work for a mid size 1000+ person consulting company
What are you smoking? My parents are in their 80s, both 15+ and 20+ years cancer free. At least in my mom's case (colon), not having surgery + chemo probably WOULD have been a death sentence. In Canada, their total out-of-pocket costs (other than transportation to/from the hospital) was like $15 for some painkillers.
The value of unoriginal thinking has gone down. Thinking which is quotidian and pedestrian has become even more worthless than it already was.
The value of true, original human thinking has gone up even higher than it ever has been.
Do we think no new companies will ever succeed now? Of course not. Who, then, will succeed? It will be innovators and original thinkers and those with excellent taste.
Why did stripe make big inroads in developer spaces even if they are in an ultra competitive low margin market? They had excellent taste in developer ergonomics. They won big not because they coded well or fast (though I know pc thinks their speed is a big factor, I think he is mostly incorrect on that) but because they had an actual sense of originality and propriety to their approach! And it resonated.
So many other products are similar. You can massively disrupt a space simply by having an original angle on it that nobody else has had. Look at video games! Perhaps the best example of this is how utterly horribly AAA games have been doing, while indie hits produce instantly timeless entries.
And soon this will be the ONLY thing that still differentiates. Artistic propriety, originality, and taste.
(And, of course, the ever-elusive ability to actually execute that I also don't think LLMs will help with.)
This is a compelling assertion. But who among us has truly original thoughts? How much new stuff can there be? If all the same-y stuff is losing value (but most stuff has value because it's FOUND not because it's unique) then isn't net value decreasing?
>The value of unoriginal thinking has gone down. Thinking which is quotidian and pedestrian has become even more worthless than it already was.
Imagine American manufacturing industry workers saying the same thing of the (at the time) soon-to-be import only products. Original thoughts are valued more than non-original ones but maybe, the market doesn't require that many original thoughts to extract max profit...
No no, but you don't understand! Of course I would be in the guild, I'm me. Everyone else is just you, so naturally they probably won't be. If they don't allow me, who would they let in??
(Sarcasm of course.) Isn't it weird how much of a quirk this mentality is? Almost reminds me of how everything though they were part of a select few who got to be secret agents in Club Penguin. "I believe every word you just said, because it's exactly what I wanted to hear."
Did you actually fix the issue, or did you fix the issue and introduce new bugs?
The problem is the asymmetry of effort. You verified you fixed your issue. The maintainers verified literally everything else (or are the ones taking the hit if they're just LGTMing it).
Sorry, I am sure your specific change was just fine. But I'm speaking generally.
How many times have I at work looked at a PR and thought "this is such a bad way to fix this I could not have come up with such a comically bad way if I tried." And naturally couldn't say this to my fine coworker whose zeal exceeded his programming skills (partly because someone else had already approved the PR after "reviewing" it...). No, I had to simply fast-follow with my own PR, which had a squashed revert of his change, with the correct fix, so that it didn't introduce race conditions into parallel test runs.
And the submitter of course has no ability to gauge whether their PR is the obvious trivial solution, or comically incorrect. Therein lies the problem.
This is why open source projects need good architecture and high test coverage.
I'd even argue we need a new type of test coverage, something that traces back the asserts to see what parts of the code are actually constrained by the tests, sort of a differential mutation analysis.
AI makes code "free" as in "free puppy".
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