Comment by neals
2 hours ago
Like many of us, I've been hobbying away on some SaaS that wraps an LLM. But I often worry, isn't this just adding buttons to an LLM call? What's the real value here? Quick money grab and wait for copies? Or do my 20 years of saas and business development actually make my SaaS better then others?
I've been struggling with that.
I built https://gallotails.com/ because I am a cocktail enthusiast. First commit, March 6th 2019. One of the features I am proud is which cocktails you can build based on your ingredients, and I was smart, the bar ignores garnishes and can suggest cocktails you're one ingredient away. But you have to add the ingredients. And interpret the bar screen.
And here's what I did with ChatGPT a few days ago: https://chatgpt.com/share/6ab59877-4b74-83e8-8da5-966d9f3a38...
Clicked the microphone icon and rambled for a few seconds (could have just taken a picture too I guess). Nudged ChatGPT to only give me simple cocktails I can stir instead of using a mixer. Said I could buy a lime, sure. Then asked how to keep the ginger beer fresh.
There is NO WAY I can code all of that in my little gallotails.com - a single chat window has entirely replaced my site. And that's my pet little project I do it on weekends, mostly to keep my tech skills sharp. I can only imagine what the biggest cocktails website, actual companies, are going / will go through once more and more people just realize the chat tab is enough. And I am not talking about purely content, ChatGPT can do everything my site does, and more, into any direction, in an instant.
Which left me with the question, then what should my site be? Community? To be taken over by agents?
Currently munching on what sites like mine should do, and what they should be.
Then maybe the need for your site is gone. That’s a good thing in the sense that the problem is solved. If your goal is “do something in the cocktail space” (which is also roughly the companies’ goal I would say), indeed you should do what the AI can’t, which I’d say is be human touch. An AI can’t give your opinion or view.
> Then maybe the need for your site is gone.
Oh yeah, and I am not mourning or anything like that. And I do want the human touch, because AI can't. But humans, at least over the internet, can send their agents, or companies can run agents and I won't know from my site if it's an actual human, or some AI fabricated interaction (can't even trust an image it uploads).
When AI first showed up a few years ago, I thought about opening an actual physical cocktail bar. Hypothesizing humans will be tired after a long day of their agents talking to other agents, they would crave for actual humans. I would ban electronics inside - no distractions. Maybe one day I will go for that...
I agree there will always be a need for community. Human connections. Folks experiencing the tastes, smells, etc.
Eg from your share, the model output “I prefer it Scotch-heavy rather than 50/50 because otherwise it gets very sweet.”
It’s basically cribbed this from someone; it literally can’t taste.
The frontier labs are not yet able to do rlvr over mixology/meatspace. So maybe think on how to capitalize on that.
I personally am more interested about personal opinions about things like cocktails rather than whatever statistically average cocktail the matrices of chatgpt come up with.
Chatgpt would shit on my great grandma's waffle recipe but it's the one I'll keep making till the day I die.
Many of us have the exact same thought process. Related: I have heard indie game developers have stopped the traditional practice of updating a dev log as a form of marketing and community building because people will point their LLm at it and create your own game before you do
I have some strong feelings about this particular story (people point LLMs at your devlog)…
- Video devlogs were long a shitty way to make a community (I can explain this one in more detail, but in short, the tradeoff between opportunity cost and video quality is a Pareto curve that is bad at all points on the curve, if your goals include both “make game” and “build community for players with devlogs”, the way out is to drop one of those two requirements, either “make YouTube/Twitch/TikTok channel” replaces “make game”, or you build some other audience for your devlogs)
- Good devlogs don’t have that level of detail, to let people easily recreate games
- Most games can’t easily be replicated by LLMs, in short, the people who are good at steering LLMs like that are making their own games.
This is not the first time I heard this story. Sometimes it comes with the lamentation “back in the day people could build communities with devlogs” and no, that was generally not a good way to build communities. It was mostly good streams from YouTubers who were making the game in order to make YouTube content or it was mediocre streams from random devs. Throw in a few people who are famous game devs who choose to stream and get a big audience because they already have a community.
I've been vibe coding a game on the side.
It really makes me appreciate how important good game design is. Claude is doing a fine job coding everything I describe, but it doesn't really understand fun, so I need to.
(It's not a great game)
It doesn't need to recreate your game. It can still muddy your marketing and redden the ocean. Especially if someone is in the business of trying to front run an indie game, they don't need to be any where close to a full or good game to attempt to steal any mindshare your project had.
1 reply →
> Good devlogs don’t have that level of detail, to let people easily recreate games
The whole problem with LLMs is that you don't need the detail.
10 replies →
> indie game developers have stopped the traditional practice of updating a dev log as a form of marketing and community building because people will point their LLm at it and create your own game before you do
And that's why we can't have good things...
(This is just gonna keep happening more and more until eventually we'll need something like a patent system for ideas)
>a patent system for ideas)
So, a patent?
> Like many of us, I've been hobbying away on some SaaS that wraps an LLM. But I often worry, isn't this just adding buttons to an LLM call?
> That's why I created isitsaas.io: your platform for determining whether your llm wrapper has product potential, or whether people would rather just use claude directly instead. Simply pop in your business idea, and our award winning, proprietary technology will ask claude if you can make money off of it.
> Trial memberships start at $10/month
Here’s an easy proxy: Did you feel the need to build it because nothing to your liking existed? Did it take some effort to build? Do others feel the need to use your thing for those reasons?
Then it’s sufficiently non-obvious. I believe there’s still a pretty big field of things that fall into this category. Making proper things is a lot more than writing some code.
I don't think "is my SaaS better than others" is the important question, instead "is SaaS going to be valuable in a cheap bespoke software future".
I've been playing with an LLM backed reference checker for my partner who is a lecturer. For each reference in some work she's marking an agent is dispatched to read the referenced source and check that the reference is correct / accurate / not hallucinated.
It's useful to her, but it feels like it would be a waste of effort to turn into a product, because pasting the same document into Claude/ChatGPT with a prompt like "download and read each reference etc" would work pretty much just as well.
I had similar concerns about an AI backed training generation company I interviewed with. I asked how they saw themselves competing with increasingly capable generic harnesses. I don't recall exactly what they said but the impression I got was they were so focused on competing with the big LMS players that they hadn't really considered it.
I believe it completely depends on your values and perspective, as a poor analogy: when mobile apps were a novelty a bunch of them were just that, novelties, the beer drinking app, the flicking a Zippo-esque app, and many more that hadn't much functionality, were more a tech demo, cool toys, etc.
If you don't care so much about adding something significant to the world, and your LLM-buttons-wrapper is a novelty, chug along and see where it goes if you're having fun. Looking for what value mean at this moment is a much harder effort, and probably a luck-based endeavour.
I don't have fun creating LLM-wrappers or at least haven't thought of a fun idea for it that could be even a fun novelty to work on so personally I'm not doing it but I'm using LLMs for other fun stuff that required much more of my free time before.
I used to think like this, but eventually I realized it's mostly just a way to pat yourself on the back. And ironically, I rarely saw people doing significant things waste energy talking like that, since there's no benefit in the exercise.
Very few things can't be reduced to insignificance. MacOS was just cribbing PARC, Facebook is just a glorified PHP forum, Dropbox is just SFTP, etc. etc.
Even in deep-tech, Zipline is just wrapping from deeper-tech (batteries motors etc), GLP-1s were a VA throwaway that dusted off, etc. etc.
LLM wrapper doesn't mean anything, it's an implementation detail. Besides being an LLM wrapper what is a given thing?
The beer app wasn't just a beer app, it was the intersection of the first time accelerometers were doing something that the average consumer could interact with in their pocket, the first time there was something to spend money on for your phone besides a wallpaper, a ton of things.
If anything now when something seems trivial or like a toy, but it has a lot of traction, I want to spend energy figuring out why is it more meaningful than it appears.
Typically maintenance, reliability, support and liability; nothing new in SaaS land. Lots of companies have the money to hand-roll things that are provided by some external SaaS but would much rather it was someone else’s problem.
Also for creatives, some sort of aesthetic control? Most of the examples on this page look like templates you’d see in an office suite that appear swish, but are ultimately bland.
Even if I could answer your question (which I can't), things change so fast right now that it might not be valid for long. All you can do is be willing to rapidly adapt and stay focused on where your product adds value.
>Or do my 20 years of saas and business development actually make my SaaS better then others?
Nope. If all your doing is prompting an agent to build stuff (especially if what it is building is based on LLMs), then you might as well take it back to the whiteboard and rethink how you're spending your time/tokens.
It's not always a call that wraps an llm.
The LLM only does average returns from average inputs.
You could build something really useful, but if I can replicate 95% of that in a weekend with Claude I'm obviously not going to pay you for it.
Some SaaS products have network effects, but that doesn't appy to new software.
Starting a SaaS business in 2026 seems a bit silly to me. Not saying people won't make money, but you'd have to be pretty lucky.
You'd be surprised how much money companies throw at very simple products, I'm working for a company making 100k mrr and was virtually entirely vibe coded by one dev until very recently
this is why people have been suggesting an AI bubble, outside of the frontier model labs