Comment by Terr_
3 days ago
> Ironically, despite the predictions that AI will murder SaaS, I think the result is they end up even more entrenched, because Job Bob's Bait Shack And Tax Filing Services
OK, so this is slightly different since it's more about how runtime behavior than design-time behavior, but... I'm in a SaaS workplace, and I've been trying to seed the following idea:
1. The very cheapest/fastest end of the market will be eaten up by Job Bob's Bait Shack stuff. Cheap wrappers around a prompt that goes "Pretend you're a computer that obeys the following rules" jank. A race to the bottom we can't win.
2. Most of our (desirable) customers will (eventually) realize they can't tolerate systems which casually or unexpectedly violate known business rules. That leads to angry consumers, junk data, broken workflows, and lawsuits.
3. When our product can capture and enforce those rules with confidence, that's both an important differentiator and also a kind of moat/stickiness.
4. Therefore there is a strategic business justification for Engineering to fence-off where we use LLMs in production. When we use them for design, it's to create better deterministic systems than before.
The last point is one I make often. AI cannot be trusted to be deterministic, but they can produce deterministic tools that are verifiable as such. Those tools I can trust as much as any other complex tool from the pre-AI era.
> pre-AI
I'd say pre-LLM, just because I don't want to surrender the term "AI" to one particular subtype without a fight.
Some of those complex tools would be "Good Old-Fashioned AI", which generally means stuff doing symbolic logic rather than mystery-weights.