Comment by fragmede
7 days ago
Fascinating. it's gone the other way for me. because I can now whip up a serious contender to any SaaS business in a week, it's made everything more fun, not less.
7 days ago
Fascinating. it's gone the other way for me. because I can now whip up a serious contender to any SaaS business in a week, it's made everything more fun, not less.
I followed a lot of Twitter people who were vibecoding their way to SaaS platforms because I thought it would be interesting to follow.
So far none of them are having a great time after their initial enthusiasm. A lot of it is people discovering that there’s far more to a business than whipping up a SaaS app that does something. I’m also seeing a big increase in venting about how their progress is slowing to a crawl as the codebase gets larger. It’s interesting to see the complaints about losing days or weeks to bugs that the LLM introduced that they didn’t understand.
I still follow because it’s interesting, but I’m starting to think 90% of the benefit is convincing people that it’s going to be easy and therefore luring them into working on ideas they’d normally not want to start.
absolutely! It turns out that the code is just this one little corner of the whole thing. A critical corner, but still just one piece of many.
Yeah, I see that perspective bu I guess my thought process is “what’s the point, if everyone else can now do the same”
I had long ago culled many of those ideas based on my ability to execute the marketing plan or the “do I really even want to run that kind of business?” test. I already knew I could build whatever I wanted to exist so My days of pumping out side projects ended long ago and I became more selective with my time.
I guess it depends why you're writing the code. I'm writing a local video library desktop app to categorise my home and work videos. I'm implementing only the features I need. No one else will use it, I'll be finished the first version after about 4 weeks of weekend and night coding, and it's got some pretty awesome features I never would have thought possible (for me). Without AI I probably never would have done this. I'm sold, even just for the reduction of friction in getting a project off the ground. The first 80% was 80% AI developed and the last 20% has flipped to 80% coded by me. Which is great, because this part is the meat of the app and where I want most input.
which turns it into passion. the side project that I'm only interested in because it could maybe make some money? eh.
a project in a niche where I live and breath the fumes off the work and I can help the whole ecosystem with their workflow? sign me up!
Agree, I’ve been searching for the latter for a long time
> I can now whip up a serious contender to any SaaS business in a week
This reminds me of the famous HN comment when Drew Houston first announced Dropbox here in 2007: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
you don't get to choose why you get Internet famous, it chooses you.
thankfully, I'm not important enough for my comment to amount to the same thing.
So you can create a serious contender to Salesforce or Zapier in a week?
like an Eventbrite or a shopmonkey. but yeah, you don't think you could? Salesforce is a whole morass. not every customer uses every corner of it, and Salesforce will nickel and dime you with their consultants and add ons and plugins. if you can be more specific as to which bit of Salesforce you want to provide to a client we can go deep.
But you said "I can now whip up a serious contender to any SaaS business in a week".
Any SaaS business. In a week. And to be a "serious contender", you have to have feature parity. Yet now you're shifting the goalposts.
What's stopping you? There are 38 weeks left in 2025. Please build "serious contenders" for each of the top 38 most popular SaaS products before the end of the year. Surely you will be the most successful programmer to have ever lived.
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