On one hand, I am incredibly tired of seeing the absolute train wreck of waste that is suave founders taking millions and blowing it on hundreds of personnel who do practically nothing— especially having seen what a single person can do with these tools.
On the other hand, death of a livelihood in a social structure that doesn’t care about you.
We’ve always had pump-and-dump trash. The terrible stuff loses and the good stuff wins. I don’t see why that would change.
The companies that ditch the management structures of yore and successfully build better software faster with the new tools will come out on top. I don’t think these companies will replace ALL saas subscriptions with in-house solutions, because one huge benefit of paying someone else to hold that bag is liability and regulatory overhead.
I think this has always been the end result - when the user can enter a business problem and it spins up a site, and they don't have to think about the hosting, database, app, etc.
> And it will be good enough for 90% of use cases.
I think it’ll just raise the automation bar that much higher. In other words, it will be good enough for 90% of yesterday’s use-cases. But tomorrow’s? I’m bearish.
I imagine the amount of onerous bureaucracy when interacting with any entity is going to explode if they expect you to do it in an automated fashion, for both private companies and the government. Especially as roles are cut because they can be “automated”. Except only 80% of the workload can be reliably automated, the other 20% requires a long tail of effort.
They’ve both been working on this for a while, I’m surprised they still haven’t launched.
Domains, auth, and databases are probably the stickiest software products of all time. I suspect it’s a combo of security concerns and the risk of eroding goodwill among developers (their most important customer base rn) if they move up the stack too quickly. Once you know that the goal is to become cloud vendors, train on/compete with their own customers, and own the entire software stack e2e it’s hard to really feel grateful that they’re dragging it out but planning on doing it anyway.
For those of us working in infra/SaaS outside these companies it’s pretty clear that the only viable path that doesn’t involve getting cannibalized is training your own agents/models. The new coding agent-infra-data business model is a path towards full commoditization and undifferentiated prompting in 3-4 vertically integrated walled gardens. If you ever start making real money on pure software infra they’ll just be able to eat you alive by implementing something similar, training on their own tools rather than yours, and integrating it into their stack (which all of your customers are on already).
Also, you should only ever use $20-200/mo subscriptions on work you want them to train against or you don’t mind automate yourself out of. Think a little bit about what you’re teaching them to do when you use their products, especially if they’re the primary interface you’re working in. People are going to start caring about this a lot when the AI companies feel safe enough to begin the “extinguish” phase of AI coding. Train your own models!
Honest question for devs out there... is anyone worried? I don't see enough frank conversation happening around this subject. Timelines. How long until salaries fall? Is it too early to stalk thinking about back up plans? Am I crazy?
I think technically building this stuff is now easier for the masses. But knowing what to build, how to describe it, how to test it, figuring out how to understand the users -- that's the hard part, always was and I'll be employed doing that for a couple more years at least. But after that, I see this all going towards building for agents, building for users will be a thing of the past. Then I think its not as easy for people to relate to that, probably want a machine designing for other machines. UX and taste don't really matter much at that point.
You're not crazy. I think there's still room for the top 5% of devs working on genuinely hard technical problems.. but I don't see a bright future for the rest.
There’s going to be a lot of chaos at some point but I think that “hybrid builders” (scientists, sales people, product developers, etc). true specialists, and new opportunities in hw/robotics/training/ will soak up a lot of talent, and be rewarding to work in. Feels very sadly k-shaped.
Software engineering on one end is going to be more like finance or medicine where the cost of poor performance is actually higher than the risk that they wont be worth what you pay them (ie there isn’t any amount of pay where it’s worth it to hire them). Then on the other it’ll be like knowing how to use PowerPoint. All the new tech categories have too many bottlenecks and challenges beyond just producing code to consolidate like that.
Salaries won't fall, they'll go up. The number of roles is what'll fall. SWE is going to become a giant game of musical chairs, and people who can't find a seat will get pushed into human facing roles ("product" / "technical sales" / "customer support" ).
No. Saas hedge is to offer solid api + mcp for agents to use whilst still maintaining their own products alongside. That's it, that's the whole thing.
Are you going to trust a vendor who has been running for years with your business critical operations or brad_69's awesome saas skills and agents? Do you think these businesses are going to shift their whole product to be in Altman's walled garden when they don't need to?
I've said it before but I'll repeat it here until someone changes my mind: jobs in IT are safe until using AI gets its equivalent of "no one ever got fired for buying IBM". Until there can be financial and legal responsibility for when things go bad, people are going to be needed.
Once it's so good AI labs will be happy to accept liability, it's game over. It was never about code quality.
Slapping up a slop website is no threat to professional tech folk.
When they have full DevOps, with multiple environments for testing, compliance with security best practices, can do database updates and data migrations, move the app smoothly between different platforms, streamline costs, and scale to at least hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of users without crashing and burning... then go ahead and worry. We aren't anywhere near that.
On the other hand, if you are purely a coder, and cannot run a project that does all of the above... maybe start your worrying earlier.
Coding is probably solved. Honestly it’s probably going to be 5 years of runtime starting now depending on industry lag and uptake.
A team I was managing spent a whole year converting government forms into a web app. It took a while and there was a lot of discussion with the end users and a bunch of back and forth (keep in mind this is government software with a lot of onerous legal requirements). Then about 4 months ago, we just fed Codex the forms, along with the UI design and the legal requirements and it spat it out in 1 hour. Was it perfect? No. But our iterative loop became make the web app, show it to end users and then incorporate feedback and completely cut out the UX team, product etc. We were able to complete the conversion in 2 weeks with one guy (something like 150+ government forms/applications). For most simple to medium corporate development work it’s basically over.
I don't think this provides a lot of value for more complex applications. It just lowers the bar for getting started.
Once the app gets a bit more complex, it won't be that much different to any more traditionally vibe coded application (code, git/pr, test, deploy, ops). It only removes the barrier to get started, but doesn't solve any of the real problems. Problems like AI slop, code rot, bad architecture, security issues, data loss/breach because of bad code, and so on.
I mean, with a Cloudflare API key you can pretty much already do that. But keeping your data straight and putting in the right authentication guards, etc. are all still where the business problems meet technical and the AI is not enough unless the agent is both architect and customer.
The Saaspocalypse was a wet fart that never went anywhere. People aren't using these AI tools to kill or replace SaaS at their jobs as much as HN wants us to believe.
The argument there wasn't that everyone everywhere would use individually customized software* instead of packaged SaaS; it was that, because AI greatly reduces the cost of building an internal app or service, it improves enterprises' BATNA when dealing with SaaS vendors, which means surplus will shift from producers to consumers. It's not obvious to me that that's not happening, since it may have been masked by a general increase in automation since AI also synergizes significantly with SaaS. (The Stripe Economics post gets into this a little, though it's mostly less curious than I'd like about why the "SaaSpocalypse" didn't materialize. Of course, Stripe has an economic interest here.)
* Some people do think this (e.g., https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2026/09/25/what-even-is-an-os-no...), but I remain somewhat skeptical that this'll be true for the most economically significant applications. This is not because I'm an AI capabilities skeptic (I'm not, I'm more of a doomer), but because even in a world where AI is designing and implementing all the software, there are probably still significant benefits to standardization. I see it as sort of analogous to compilers; we might get a world where compilers are both used and maintained almost exclusively by LLMs, but we probably won't get one where compilers stop being used or maintained at all because LLMs write everything in assembly.
You want to talk to a few guys not in the software industry to understand what the world is like first.
While there are many enthusiasts out there, lots and lots of people couldn't care less about ChatGPT allows them to "buuld their own website". It's simply irrelevant to their life.
People curate their brands on socials. Having a website is not really the badge it once was, and the ability to generate them like this further reduces the social proof they used to provide.
Look at squarespace + wix + lovable + framer + vercel + wordpress (and agencies), cloudflare, godaddy, etc. and think about how much more demand there is for a vertically integrated one stop shop without friction. This is a massive market even if it doesn’t become myspace.
This is the top of the funnel for most people building a tech product or marketing their business, so it’s very helpful if you intend to sell other services they might want to use down the line. (Cf Cloudflare except imagine if they also integrated ads into one of the most popular websites in the world)
It's a matter of weeks/months before they'll host a complete webapp, not just a site. The Saaspocalypse will be complete.
On one hand, I am incredibly tired of seeing the absolute train wreck of waste that is suave founders taking millions and blowing it on hundreds of personnel who do practically nothing— especially having seen what a single person can do with these tools.
On the other hand, death of a livelihood in a social structure that doesn’t care about you.
We’ve always had pump-and-dump trash. The terrible stuff loses and the good stuff wins. I don’t see why that would change.
The companies that ditch the management structures of yore and successfully build better software faster with the new tools will come out on top. I don’t think these companies will replace ALL saas subscriptions with in-house solutions, because one huge benefit of paying someone else to hold that bag is liability and regulatory overhead.
look at the accounting firms, you'll just have four or five companies that switch off between who holds the bag
I think this has always been the end result - when the user can enter a business problem and it spins up a site, and they don't have to think about the hosting, database, app, etc.
Vibe coding full circle
And it will be good enough for 90% of use cases.
> And it will be good enough for 90% of use cases.
I think it’ll just raise the automation bar that much higher. In other words, it will be good enough for 90% of yesterday’s use-cases. But tomorrow’s? I’m bearish.
I imagine the amount of onerous bureaucracy when interacting with any entity is going to explode if they expect you to do it in an automated fashion, for both private companies and the government. Especially as roles are cut because they can be “automated”. Except only 80% of the workload can be reliably automated, the other 20% requires a long tail of effort.
And whose neck can you choke when an error from the AI generated site forces you to refund customers or something worse?
2 replies →
given the percentage of business processes that still run on a manually updated spreadsheet, I am not sure that is actually worse.
It is likely better in some ways and worse in others...and few of hte people involved will have the understanding to tell the difference.
They’ve both been working on this for a while, I’m surprised they still haven’t launched.
Domains, auth, and databases are probably the stickiest software products of all time. I suspect it’s a combo of security concerns and the risk of eroding goodwill among developers (their most important customer base rn) if they move up the stack too quickly. Once you know that the goal is to become cloud vendors, train on/compete with their own customers, and own the entire software stack e2e it’s hard to really feel grateful that they’re dragging it out but planning on doing it anyway.
For those of us working in infra/SaaS outside these companies it’s pretty clear that the only viable path that doesn’t involve getting cannibalized is training your own agents/models. The new coding agent-infra-data business model is a path towards full commoditization and undifferentiated prompting in 3-4 vertically integrated walled gardens. If you ever start making real money on pure software infra they’ll just be able to eat you alive by implementing something similar, training on their own tools rather than yours, and integrating it into their stack (which all of your customers are on already).
Also, you should only ever use $20-200/mo subscriptions on work you want them to train against or you don’t mind automate yourself out of. Think a little bit about what you’re teaching them to do when you use their products, especially if they’re the primary interface you’re working in. People are going to start caring about this a lot when the AI companies feel safe enough to begin the “extinguish” phase of AI coding. Train your own models!
This is truly depressing and most likely very true.
I do not see enough people discussing this and trying to position their businesses in a way to avoid destruction at the hands of the labs.
1 reply →
Honest question for devs out there... is anyone worried? I don't see enough frank conversation happening around this subject. Timelines. How long until salaries fall? Is it too early to stalk thinking about back up plans? Am I crazy?
I think technically building this stuff is now easier for the masses. But knowing what to build, how to describe it, how to test it, figuring out how to understand the users -- that's the hard part, always was and I'll be employed doing that for a couple more years at least. But after that, I see this all going towards building for agents, building for users will be a thing of the past. Then I think its not as easy for people to relate to that, probably want a machine designing for other machines. UX and taste don't really matter much at that point.
You're not crazy. I think there's still room for the top 5% of devs working on genuinely hard technical problems.. but I don't see a bright future for the rest.
There’s going to be a lot of chaos at some point but I think that “hybrid builders” (scientists, sales people, product developers, etc). true specialists, and new opportunities in hw/robotics/training/ will soak up a lot of talent, and be rewarding to work in. Feels very sadly k-shaped.
Software engineering on one end is going to be more like finance or medicine where the cost of poor performance is actually higher than the risk that they wont be worth what you pay them (ie there isn’t any amount of pay where it’s worth it to hire them). Then on the other it’ll be like knowing how to use PowerPoint. All the new tech categories have too many bottlenecks and challenges beyond just producing code to consolidate like that.
Salaries won't fall, they'll go up. The number of roles is what'll fall. SWE is going to become a giant game of musical chairs, and people who can't find a seat will get pushed into human facing roles ("product" / "technical sales" / "customer support" ).
1 reply →
No. Saas hedge is to offer solid api + mcp for agents to use whilst still maintaining their own products alongside. That's it, that's the whole thing.
Are you going to trust a vendor who has been running for years with your business critical operations or brad_69's awesome saas skills and agents? Do you think these businesses are going to shift their whole product to be in Altman's walled garden when they don't need to?
In a corporate environment the ability to code does not substitute a decent software engineer.
Nah. Website builders have been around for a long time in various forms. This isn't much different.
I've said it before but I'll repeat it here until someone changes my mind: jobs in IT are safe until using AI gets its equivalent of "no one ever got fired for buying IBM". Until there can be financial and legal responsibility for when things go bad, people are going to be needed. Once it's so good AI labs will be happy to accept liability, it's game over. It was never about code quality.
Slapping up a slop website is no threat to professional tech folk.
When they have full DevOps, with multiple environments for testing, compliance with security best practices, can do database updates and data migrations, move the app smoothly between different platforms, streamline costs, and scale to at least hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of users without crashing and burning... then go ahead and worry. We aren't anywhere near that.
On the other hand, if you are purely a coder, and cannot run a project that does all of the above... maybe start your worrying earlier.
1 reply →
Coding is probably solved. Honestly it’s probably going to be 5 years of runtime starting now depending on industry lag and uptake.
A team I was managing spent a whole year converting government forms into a web app. It took a while and there was a lot of discussion with the end users and a bunch of back and forth (keep in mind this is government software with a lot of onerous legal requirements). Then about 4 months ago, we just fed Codex the forms, along with the UI design and the legal requirements and it spat it out in 1 hour. Was it perfect? No. But our iterative loop became make the web app, show it to end users and then incorporate feedback and completely cut out the UX team, product etc. We were able to complete the conversion in 2 weeks with one guy (something like 150+ government forms/applications). For most simple to medium corporate development work it’s basically over.
12 replies →
What do you mean in a few months?
Yesterday my dot made a web app to view 3D microscopy files
https://mucus-atlas-viewer.pazimzadeh.chatgpt.site/?sample=k...
I didn't even know about the sites feature
I don't think this provides a lot of value for more complex applications. It just lowers the bar for getting started.
Once the app gets a bit more complex, it won't be that much different to any more traditionally vibe coded application (code, git/pr, test, deploy, ops). It only removes the barrier to get started, but doesn't solve any of the real problems. Problems like AI slop, code rot, bad architecture, security issues, data loss/breach because of bad code, and so on.
It is a complete web app, with a Cloudflare backend.
I mean, with a Cloudflare API key you can pretty much already do that. But keeping your data straight and putting in the right authentication guards, etc. are all still where the business problems meet technical and the AI is not enough unless the agent is both architect and customer.
The Saaspocalypse was a wet fart that never went anywhere. People aren't using these AI tools to kill or replace SaaS at their jobs as much as HN wants us to believe.
https://www.stripeeconomics.com/p/the-saaspocalypse-was-more...
The argument there wasn't that everyone everywhere would use individually customized software* instead of packaged SaaS; it was that, because AI greatly reduces the cost of building an internal app or service, it improves enterprises' BATNA when dealing with SaaS vendors, which means surplus will shift from producers to consumers. It's not obvious to me that that's not happening, since it may have been masked by a general increase in automation since AI also synergizes significantly with SaaS. (The Stripe Economics post gets into this a little, though it's mostly less curious than I'd like about why the "SaaSpocalypse" didn't materialize. Of course, Stripe has an economic interest here.)
* Some people do think this (e.g., https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2026/09/25/what-even-is-an-os-no...), but I remain somewhat skeptical that this'll be true for the most economically significant applications. This is not because I'm an AI capabilities skeptic (I'm not, I'm more of a doomer), but because even in a world where AI is designing and implementing all the software, there are probably still significant benefits to standardization. I see it as sort of analogous to compilers; we might get a world where compilers are both used and maintained almost exclusively by LLMs, but we probably won't get one where compilers stop being used or maintained at all because LLMs write everything in assembly.
2 replies →
Except for the companies that pay anti-competition money to OpenAI: cloning their applications will be restricted.
You want to talk to a few guys not in the software industry to understand what the world is like first.
While there are many enthusiasts out there, lots and lots of people couldn't care less about ChatGPT allows them to "buuld their own website". It's simply irrelevant to their life.
I doubt it, but I am open to being wrong.
People curate their brands on socials. Having a website is not really the badge it once was, and the ability to generate them like this further reduces the social proof they used to provide.
Look at squarespace + wix + lovable + framer + vercel + wordpress (and agencies), cloudflare, godaddy, etc. and think about how much more demand there is for a vertically integrated one stop shop without friction. This is a massive market even if it doesn’t become myspace.
This is the top of the funnel for most people building a tech product or marketing their business, so it’s very helpful if you intend to sell other services they might want to use down the line. (Cf Cloudflare except imagine if they also integrated ads into one of the most popular websites in the world)
Yeah, I'm seeing how I can move my dad's website to this so he can manage his site on his own.
Eternal AI September.
This is probably going to be as successful as Sora
The Sites feature seems a lot more monetizable than Sora ever could have been.