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Comment by paulryanrogers | Hacker News Reader

Doesn't this assume there will always be significant business needs that can be met by software, but are not yet? Or at least not as efficiently as they could be?

I imagine there is an upper bound on how much of the world can be eaten by software, and the trend seems to be getting closer to that point. Unless there are some massive breakthroughs in robotics or cybernetics which open more of the physical world to software.

There's also a point where incremental software improvement requires bulldozing, paving, or burning so much nature that we'll be worse off in the end. Watching billionaires squabble about who gets the new AI data centers makes me wonder if we haven't crossed over that point a few funding rounds ago.

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I don't think we’re anywhere near the upper bound yet and IMO the prevalence of SaaS software that could be better done in house if resources permitted demonstrates that. The future will be a lot more bespoke.

Like Simon’s quote above says, software is a competitive advantage so when one company develops software that makes them more efficient or grows revenue, competitors have to follow suit or get left behind. It’s an economic arms race. That’s why the dreaded outsourcing wave of the 2000s never materialized: companies ended up hiring a bunch more software engineers in the US and outsourced a bunch of other engineering to India and other countries.

The interesting question is how this will interact with current interest rates and the end of ZIRP.

I think it really depends how much improvement we get in AI from here.

I work at a small business and understand the entire system as a whole.

Most the complexity we have is in the UI so non-technical people can interact and work with company data/databases. Our SaaS is really the same thing but stuff we didn't want to build in house. There is no rocket science being done here.

At some level of AI accuracy though it would seem like there would be a phase transition that most of this UI goes away along with the need for many of the employees.

Right now there is no risk of this happening but at some level of accuracy we go from 200 people to like 20 with the only future head count coming in sales. Most likely though I would expect a competitor to eat our lunch in the phase transition and we go from 200 to zero.

Pushing 50 here, I am trying to think right now of my AI hedge/career change to something more creative/artistic that being a human itself has value. I managed to avoid working in a factory like my father by being a shitty computer but there might be no market for shitty human computers in 10 years.

Software is being commoditized by SAAS. Generally that means it's table stakes, not necessarily a competitive advantage.

90% of the small SaaS products I’ve seen used within business introduced tons of pain points and inefficiencies, ranging from constant bugs to manual data entry moving it from one SaaS to the next. Once you throw in all the per-seat licensing, their value proposition isn’t always that great.

I think a product like GithubNext Spark [1] that can handle deployment, SSO, databases, uploads, etc with an LLM fine tuned on the managed runtime API will be a very productive tool. It already works surprisingly well in my experience although it’s an mvp and they havent fleshed out database stuff yet. Kind of like a higher code Retool that can still be used by non-programmers.

[1] https://githubnext.com/projects/github-spark/

It is all the trend nowadays in enterprise consulting, SaaS products being plugged like LEGOs, with a couple of serverless deployments for business logic, aka MACH architecture.

The original dream of Web Services and SOA.

I actually strongly believe the universe has an effectively infinite carrying capacity for software. This is because all systems can be improved upon recursively

> This is because all systems can be improved upon recursively

Until it becomes cosmic code.

( https://minimaxir.com/2025/01/write-better-code/ / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42584400 )

It doesn't take infinite iterations to solve a problem.

> and the trend seems to be getting closer to that point.

What evidence suggests this to you?

Things that seem borderline worse when being done in software. Like touchscreens in car controls, beta self driving, shitty/broken websites that should be paper flyers on bulletin boards, a tablet at the barbers where a sign in sheet or paper numbers would do better, those "smart" doors some grocery stores tried, etc.

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