Comment by martinald
4 days ago
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.