Comment by harrall
5 days ago
But have you ever tried to clone a product or tool for yourself before? At first it’s great because you think that you saved money but then you start having to maintain it… fixing problems, filling in gaps… you now realize that you made a mistake. Just because AI can do it now doesn’t mean you aren’t just now having to use AI to do the same thing…
Also, agents are not deterministic. If you use it to analyze data, it will get it right most of the time but, once in a blue moon, it will make shit up, except you can’t tell which time it was. You could make it deterministic by having AI write a tool instead… except you now have the first problem of maintaining a tool.
That isn’t to say that there isn’t small low hanging fruit that AI will replace, but it’s a bit different when you need a real product with support.
At the end of the day, you hire a plumber or use a SaaS not because you can’t do it yourself, but because you don’t want to do it and rather want someone else who is committed to it to handle it.
I'm not saying _the end user_ clones it. I mean someone else does (more efficiently with agents) and runs it as a _new_ SaaS company. They would provide support just like the existing one would, but arguably at a cheaper price point.
And regarding agents being non deterministic, if they write a bunch of SQL queries to a file for you, they are deterministic. They can just write "disposable" tools and scripts - not always doing it thru their context.
The challenge to this is that so much of the difficulty in getting people to switch products is trust, and a couple of people running saas with claude code has no differentiation and no durability.
I think it will be a little different: black box the thing, testable inputs and outputs, and then go to town for a week or two until it is reasonable. Then open source it. Too big/complex for an agent? Break down the black box into reasonable ideas that could comprise it and try again. You can replace many legacy products and just open source the thing. If the customer can leave behind some predatory-priced garbage for a solution where they get the code I think they would be a lot more likely to pay for help managing/setting it up.
But isn’t this what the article is saying? Even with AI you’re still not going to build your own payroll/ERP/CRM.