Back To Atoms: Why we can stop building SaaS and build the future instead.
carllippert.com
carllippert.com
Now something goes wrong. A customer isn't getting what they ordered. What do you do about it?
Do you just drop the customer? Well that's lost revenue, or an easy win for another company, you don't want to do that. Maybe you tell the AI to fix the customer in a particular way and hope it will do so. If it does, all it takes is having a human available to fix it (a customer support dept, even if tier 2), but if it doesn't fix it now you still need all the software you needed before to fix it.
I've built line-of-business software before, and I've over-automated things before. Being able to inspect the state of systems, and being able to manually change things in software, is incredibly valuable. This is why spreadsheets run businesses.
My bet is that companies will still mostly buy the software they were buying before, but that some of the interactions with that software that humans would have done before, AI tools will action instead. All the same CMSs, CRMs, ERPs, and other TLAs will exist, they'll just be augmented with AI. They'll probably do some more interesting things with that AI, but they'll still exist in fundamentally the same way. Companies are not going to entrust their business to a black box that sometimes says no.
I was hired as a CTO for a start-up that had a shitty solution (bad performance, bad practices - such as storing passwords in plaintext and customer service would just copy the password and log in the customer's account manually).
They had a custom back-end where they were basically handcuffed to a couple of flows. They couldn't see the full state of the system. Not even a fraction of it. Everyone hated it to the point where most were using whiteboards to work.
My first move was to normalize the database and throw in an off the shelf back-end where they got access to the full state of the system (with some aspects of course conveniently configured out).
Then, based on their own whiteboard flows and how they were using the new all you can eat back-end, we implemented a number of flows that mapped to how they actually worked. This is on top of being able to manually pull any switch. From what I could tell, they loved it, both the freedom and the ease.
It was truly satisfying to see those empty whiteboards.
The true measure of success of LoB apps. That, and genuinely insightful feature requests rather than workarounds
AI looks 10x better than the alternative, while it's being pumped full of VC cash and while we haven't realised all the downsides (because so far we've only seen idealised marketing promises). It'll work out to be an expensive and not much better option.
Personally, I think AI is in the hope cycle right now. It's new (in an industry that sees very few new things.) I can see it being a useful tool in our belt in the coming years.
But equally, I don't think it'll replace (most of) us. I think we'll use it to be more productive.
Your target market will also matter. We're B2B, and companies don't buy "software" from us, they buy solutions to problems. And that very much includes the ability to talk to a human and have them solve the problem. (The human might use AI to solve the problem)
The point is, this is a large complex future space, and I believe the statement above will age well. AI will move the needle, but at the moment it's future capabilities and effects are also largely speculation.
Or maybe I'm just jaded having seen this cycle a lot, where most fall short, some disappear, amd a few stick around.
Is it worth it?
Are those the only or even main reasons you don't want to "just drop the customer"?
I hope not. Is offering a good service at an attractive price, one that delivers on its promises not even a thing any more?
Works for Google. Lots of their stuff has non-existent support even today.
At the end of the day it might cost more to acquire the customer than not.
I think the issue will come when companies start dropping customers that don't fit certain templates. They'll be accused of using racist or sexist AI, or something like that, and it'll be hard to defend against that because AI is a black box. With humans you can say "we have a policy against this", or "we'll retrain our employees", but that won't be possible for AI in the same way. Yes you can "retrain" an AI, but that retraining looks a lot less like a corporate education program, and a lot more like an IT change request, and surprise surprise, we're back to buying software systems.
I don’t see how that would be relevant from the companies perspective. Companies get accused of this and much worse all the time and it almost never has any real effect, happy to be corrected
Ok, they drop customers too, and even as a customer its gard to talk to a human. And that in itself is a huge barrier to entry to some possible customers.
Personally we use Google for ads. We pay them money, but don't get to talk to a human. They'd drop us if we behave in a way the algorithm doesn't like. They get away with this because there are very few alternatives.
But we don't use GCP. We use AWS, and talk to a human a couple times a year. And issues get fixed.
So yes, it works for Google, but only really in the space where they have a somewhat-monopoly.
In other spaces like Gmail or Google+, they happily drop users all the time because those are users, not customers.
The comparison is made is 'Can AI take over X, and do as good as a job as someone who's good at X'. But I think the reality is that these products aren't coming after the ones that are doing 'great work'.
There's tons of mediocre software being written and in many cases mediocre is kind of good enough. I think it's going to empower people who _aren't_ thoughtful and they'll be more productive than ever.
So my prediction is that companies will start trusting this black box, because it's cheap and fast. I also think a quality crisis in many fields is inevitable. We're already seeing this a bunch in very obvious ways, but its way more scary when the models are better and the errors are subtle.
Companies entrust their business to a black box that sometimes says no now. AI will not change that, and I agree it will get worse.
It is the irony of automation that some people still need the skills, knowledge, and abilities even more to fix problems that the automation can't fix. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ironies_of_Automation
Seems like you’re also assuming some AI-inherent problem which is left unexplained.
If it’s a human level AI you tell it to solve the issue with the company’s philosophy in mind and wonder why off the shelf human level AI doesn’t have that in its “system prompt” or whatever term it will be.
This whole problem is blown out of something that every AI-phobe seems to assume but keeps secret, which is a common trope at this point.
That IF is very big case here.
> This whole problem is blown out of something that every AI-phobe seems to assume but keeps secret, which is a common trope at this point.
It happens again and again CURRENTLY that AI's behave exactly like Djinns. They do what you tell them, not always what you mean. Like, "Geologists Recommend Eating At Least One Small Rock Per Day". They make perfectly coherent advice, but sometimes it's hilariously wrong and AI doesn't know it's wrong. But people trust it anyway.
What current “AI” does is irrelevant in this context, but I think you’re overdramatizing on this tangent a little. Almost everyone knows that 2024 AI still hallucinates and you can’t take its output at face value. Those who don’t know may be still researching or just generally gullible/nonanalytic. There’s no problem here, taking our regular baseline into account. People believe yellow press and influencers everyday.
AI will own the next layer... dynamically generating SQL and code to access existing systems.
OK
> Now something goes wrong. A customer isn't getting what they ordered. What do you do about it?
What do you do when something goes wrong with a human?
Do that.
End of story.
You train it, you replace it with a more suitable worker, whatever.
You've answered your own dilemma with the premise.
And if you got rid of all your human tools because AI, how do you put a human back in the loop?
I've designed 'complex' (for me haha) mechanisms with levers, gears and springs, the manufacturing of which would've required a machine shop, multiple trips to the hardware store, tons of hands-on experience and lots of careful measuring and swearing, if not for the miracle of CAD software and my printer.
I just modelled the thing, hit print, and after 2-3 iterations of fixing dumb mistakes, I had a product that worked, and fit to tighter tolerances than what I could've realistically made by hand.
Of course not everything can be made out of cheap thermoplastic, but the jump to higher grade materials is available even today for the everyman.
We often don't solve technical problems or write algorithm. We're here to understand a client who doesn't know what he wants. Good luck for the general purpose AI to solve this [1] "If Architects had to work like Programmers"
We need all the tools we can get to amplify our efforts.
Further, I find that AI makes it much easier to dabble outside my wheelhouse and to interface with other technical people much quicker and better. Where I used to have to read endlessly to understand the context of unknown-to-me technology, now I can get that in seconds. Previously this luxury was only available to large corporates who can hire a wide variety of experts.
I think we'll see dramatically more 1-10 person software businesses in future.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_engineering_demograph...
Yes, the AI let's you ask questions and get answers. It's a more interactive approach, and it helps to clarify thinking, but having a solid foundation will always lead to better understanding.
As someone who has always worked in a small company, and as someone who has by necessity had to learn many different parts of IT, up and down the IT stack, it's always been possible.
Equally I work with businesses, the vast majority of whom are less than 10 people - and those small businesses produce code every day which is used all over the place. Turns out, if you knew a domain really well, could code, and don't have 3 layers of management, good things can get done really quickly.
Right, but last time I checked it was behind pages of seo bullshit. I suspect many of us still have that inertia since our learning age, so knowing where to get information feels natural, while in reality it’s knowledge aquired with years or decades. Imagine forgetting all you know and trying to figure out the learning meta of that medium article. Multiply it by what google “search” is today. You’re basically screwed.
Only very shallow SaaS may be killed with LLMs but not 98% of em.
Taking a payment with Stripe is a 5 minute job. Taking thousands of payments a day, without ever double charging someone, and without ever losing an order, while optimising the UX and allowing a customer support team to provide good service, that's a huge task. (Also no criticism of Stripe, having looked at Braintree circa 2019 I expect it would be significantly harder with them).
99% of the people who were building SaaS probably arent skilled enough to launch rockets or fight climate change with science.
Now if youre talking about kids still in school, who have yet to decide on what to major, then yes perhaps most of them will forgo learning how to build software and pursue hard tech fields instead
But business realities mean that just cannot exist, it actually doesn't survive first contact with business logic let alone all the auth* issues. An atomic level of interoperability will hit this issue immediately.
If they are seeing AI as a sort of fuzzy connector between components, it is a non-starter from my perspective. Even if you had squishy brains doing the work, it wouldn't pan out.
there will def be some opportunities for mid-tier software(not necessarily saas) companies where they end up leveraging either some niche distribution or some neat packaging.
another ray of hope is - distribution takes time, there is a long cycle of adoption for any new tech. currently we are in "the chasm" and some of us(us being software builders) will end up benefitting from a long adoption curves. but i have my doubts if it's a vc backed thing as it will be a slow cycle.
How do you create exponential growth when you are building military hardware?
Are we? Just look at climate change.
>We are fighting climate change with science and industry.
We are also fighting fighting climate change with pseudo science and industry money.
We aren't good at fixing things, we are good at surviving even if we don't fix things. Maybe lots of people die, maybe we repeat the same mistakes over and over again but at least some will survive to start all over again. Every high culture went down the hill and a new emerged from the rubbles of the previous one. But that's not fixing, that surviving.