Comment by jerf
2 hours ago
No amount of AI, barring something not just superhuman but radically superhuman, can substitute for contact with the real world: https://jerf.org/iri/post/2026/what_value_code_in_ai_era/
Again, barring radical superhumanity, in many cases companies do not today want their own bespoke solutions to a problem and wouldn't want it even if the developers were working for free, because the other costs to the business would still be more than they want to pay and more than another business can charge to make the problem more thoroughly (even if not completely) go away.
I suspect this is another reason you may see some companies making grabs at data and points-of-presence that otherwise make little or no sense... they're trying to colonize and defend the sources of contact with the real world before someone else gets there and locks them out.
I see it differently. For every business, there are two types of probelms: (1) core concerns which are problems that cost significant time/money or earn money, and (2) things that are insignificant to the business.
With insignificant concerns, at times it seems a business might not even care about the cost but that's also the same areas where a cut in quality is ignored if it comes with a cut in costs as well.
A lot of SasS fall into this category, so even if AI is not great, the value of getting a solution in under 5 minutes, simply by talking to a machine, is too great a value for a business.
All those marketing sites that might've been handled by 3rd party agencies in the 80s, became in-house clip art projects in the 90s, became SaaS sites in the 2000s, and will become "CEO told his dreams to the AI, and the AI delivered while they were being driven to work" projects in 2030s.
The fact that it's bespoke or not is besides the point when writing up the requirements means the site is essentially already built and there's no need to vet vendor at all.
Now for significant concerns, SaaS will likely still have a place, but some aspects of it will be minimized. Companies focused on Wordpress, Jira, and Salesforce customizations will fall by the wayside since the main company can just say "talk to our AI agent and it'll customize it for you".