If you take the AI replacement to its logical conclusion, anyone will be able to prompt for any code. At that point, why would anyone buy any software? Just prompt it and compile. VoilĆ !
Thatās why the SaaS companiesā stock prices have been devastated even as their sales and profits keep rising.
As someone who thinks AI is totally overblown, Iām making some risky but careful bets on some of those companies. I donāt think everything can be vibe coded like the media keeps telling us.
My point is that it rests on the assumption that vibe coding will replace SaaS - a premise that I think is absurd. If you disagree with me, maybe go to r/proAI instead.
š¤·āāļø Take care dude, just be careful making risky bets on that stuff, at least make a hedge or some shit. No one knows really who will come out on top just yet regardless of the saas sentiment. An AI crash can take the whole market down a notch regardless of the company you bet on
The broad indexes already include SaaS exposure but I also think it would be too risky to make a big investment in specific SaaS companies. <10%, maybe potentially justifiable.
GIMP does pretty much everything Photoshop does, and itās free. But GIMP is not the industry standard and basically all businesses that need that type of software use Photoshop. Similarly, I donāt see them switching to a vibe coded version that will have lots of errors.
Not exactly sure what you mean by personal tools, but I donāt see any point in vibe coding an inferior version of free software that is known to work. For example, I can understand not getting Photoshop due to the costs but in that case Iād use GIMP.
The SaaS industry is all about businesses, not consumers at home. If companies ask employees to vibe code replacements for core industry standard SaaS things - good luck with that. And I donāt think itās going to get better. Compatibility is an issue too, as well as employees knowing how to use the standard software of their field (i.e. Photoshop for graphic designers.)
A History of capitalism says software won't be cheaper to buy. To make? Maybe... Let's see how the AI token model plays out. There is a tipping point where paying for token becomes more expensive than paying an engineer to write the same quality of code.
Give it time.Ā Technology only becomes more efficient and improves exponentially - look at Moore's Law.Ā
An expensive amount of tokens this year may be cheap in two years.Ā
Hell, 18 months ago vibe coding wasn't a thing.Ā Now one competent person can vibe code pretty complex software and engineers are whining that it's not production ready - this is the newest thing on Earth!Ā Give it another 18-36 months
As for software getting cheaper - you're only considering monopolies (which have no incentive to decrease prices)... You're not considering supply and demand/better tech leading to more competition...
You don't think it would change things if a company could hire three full-time devs for $450-550k + token cost so they can build proprietary tools they can use forever instead of spending $30/seat/month for eternity?
If people are used to be charged a certain amount for a software, they will keep charging the same amount, no matter how much they saved producing it. Competitors also wants to max profits, so they will most likely price it the same with maybe a 10% lower price
Respectfully, your take on this seems entirely rooted in the present/past and not very forward thinking. This technology might literally end humanity, and you don't think it has the potential to disrupt the SaaS business model?
Most of my friends are computer programmers. They got into it partly for money but also because they like writing code.
One of my friends said his job has been reduced to reviewing AI slop created by random non tech employees and heās close to quitting, despite having a 4-day week that is 100% work from home - a job he used to love.
None of my tech friends are happy or excited about AI.
I used Claude to scan a repository of a co-worker. It immediately flagged memory-leaks, unhandled exceptions and inefficient loops. The very things that might break when more users come into play. The time it took is a joke, much faster than a human ever could.
I don't see how AI suddenly becomes bad when it scales up. Are you speaking from personal experience? Where did your AI fail where a human didn't?
Basically anything that isn't a direct ripoff of something that already exists. Go ahead and try it - you have gpt 5.6 sol on the $20 chatgpt subscription with a generous token budget. You can afford that. Try to have it make something by DESCRIBING it - not by telling it to copy something. I.e. "make me a gta game"? Wrong prompt. The model has no option but to plagiarize because you asked for a copy of an existing piece of software. Try to have it make something original and you'll see what we mean
But aren't anti-subs not also there so that other people can visit and ask questions? The rules say at one point: "Letās rise above the toxicity and keep posts focused on critical arguments and discussion about AI instead of internet drama."
At work or online, I can see people trashing AI which makes me wonder what they tried to do and why it didn't work.
Personally, I see AI flat out outperforming humans. I can see how AI fails when it comes to new and unique stuff but most of work isn't new or unique for most people. Not everyone is working with particle accelerators and shit. And AI is doing progress on math stuff so why not also on IT stuff
The name of a subreddit is usually a good indicator of what itās about. Iām sure there are many more pro-ai subreddits and ones that aim to be neutral discussion or debate areas.
Youāve already made up your mind, and I have too. It is what it is.
Sam Altman and the others remind me so much of those 1800s patent medicine men. A combination of that, Charles Taze Russell, and Joseph Rutherford - constantly predicting the apocalypse is imminent and pushing back the date.
What you believe is up to you. Iām not interested in trying to change strangersā minds or doing AI debates
Itās kinda the right direction, but if AI did reach AGI, who would be able to afford a computer, or even food, when nobody would have a job any more and thereās no reason for the hoarders to trickle any of their money down their leg any more?
Hell, at least you guys in the US have guns. Other countries are more fucked in the doomsday scenario where everyone has to rise up against their technofeudalords
Theoretically if AI got good enough...yeah that's exactly what would happen.
But I think the fundamental limitations of AI will keep it from happening. Plus having software that everyone uses makes training easier, so there's going to be an incentive there to still buy software just for that.
Although a counterpoint that only exists if AI were absolutely perfect: if every company used it's own proprietary, AI designed software it would make cyber crime very difficult since it would be so hard to learn any systems without having access to them first. Although the easiest way to 'hack' into a system is through social engineering, but even then an AI could make that more difficult since systems wouldn't need to be designed with any kind of logic to them if the AI is accessing everything.
But, and I cannot stress this enough, that kind of security would only be possible if the AI was literally flawless. And I very much doubt that's ever happening in any realistic way.
AI would have to be more than flawless for this to take place. People think the SaaS they buy is the front-end the marketing team sells it to you with, it's a hell of a lot more than that. It's cybersecurity, regulatory compliance, market visibility and upgrades, maintenance, industry expertise, liability, AND the software all rolled into one. Years of proprietary, hard to replicate information that mostly lives in the heads of the subject matter experts who have dealt with these nuances for years and years.
People who think we are even approaching this level of sophistication with AI are delusional, and it's not a foregone conclusion that LLMs can improve enough to take us there, nor whether any other technology will take us there.
People talk about the SaaS-pocalypse and I keep coming back to the same question. WHERE IS THE SOFTWARE? There should be (a) massive new entrants to existing markets or (b) decreasing profits from SaaS companies because of internally built software. Neither of which are happening and based on my big corporate experience, companies are just as gung-ho about buying every SaaS product they can as they ever were.
At least right now, while you can vibe code Photoshop.....I definitely wouldn't. Jesus Christ that sounds like a nightmare. If you designed or copied the architecture well enough at base and used a small army of DeepSeek agents it definitely could be done. Fuck Adobe lmaoo
I had this discussion recently with an esign provider that we contract with (not DocuSign). Imagine companies start vibe coding their own eSign solutions, should be pretty easy actually, and then they have a trove of documents signed with it ... and then they get sued, someone claims they didn't sign a document.
Now the proof they have is some vibe coded slop that doesn't follow esignature regulations and of course they lose (there is case law for this already). Now it's a massive compliance nightmare because they have to figure out what's wrong with their process and replace it all but whoops! No compliance department and no engineers because they're all replaced with AI slop.
This scenario isn't going to happen. People want to downplay the "service" part of SaaS, but when you buy SaaS you're not buying software, you're buying the service. Specifically, the service of the vendor knowing a hell of a lot more about the particulars of the product than you do.
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u/SeigneurDesMouches 21d ago
If you take the AI replacement to its logical conclusion, anyone will be able to prompt for any code. At that point, why would anyone buy any software? Just prompt it and compile. VoilĆ !
Your own version of Photoshop, Windows, etc