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.
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?
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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).
> 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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> 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?
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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?
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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.
> 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.
> 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
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.
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
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...).
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
“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.
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).
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.
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.
> "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.
>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.
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.
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.
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).
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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.
> 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
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 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.
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!
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.
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?
AI can self direct SEO pretty good, hate to be the bearer of bad news.
It was never easy after ~2010.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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We really need a downvote button on blog posts
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.
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.
[dead]
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).