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Comment by bashtoni | Hacker News Reader

This is a good read that is a great starting point for thinking about this. It essentially takes the extreme position - SaaS no longer needs a UI, because the LLM is the UI.

In reality, as always, I suspect the truth will be somewhere in between. SaaS products that succeed will be those that have a good UI _and_ and good API that LLMs can use.

An LLM is not always the best interface, particularly for data access. For most people, clicking a few times in the right places is preferable to having to type out (or even speak aloud) "Show me all the calls I did today", waiting for the result, having to follow up with "include the time per call and the expected deal value", etc etc.

There is undoubtedly an opportunity for disruption here, but I think an LLM only SaaS platform is going to be a very tough sell for at least the next decade.

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Yep, it's funny how one of the key factors that limits LLM usage is just the typing speed of users.

I agree that the amount of bespoke UI that needs to exist probably won't stagnate. Humans need about the same amount of visual information to verify a task was done correctly as they need to do the task.

LLM generated UI is an interesting field. Sure, you can get ChatGPT to generate schema to lay out some buttons. But it seems harder to identify the context and relevant information that must be displayed for the human to be a valuable/necessary asset in the process.

I agree with you - also because most of the activities described in the post can be turned around where the SaaS wraps a LLM around specific tasks to augment data (e.g. call transcription, summarisation and preparation for the next meeting).

As an industry, we have been through a textual user interface already: terminals, and we moved away from that.

And voice UIs are not new either: we have had voice assistant for quite some time now, and they didn't see the success Apple, Google or Amazon were expecting (recently it came out that most of echo use cases were about setting timers).

Also— for B2B SaaS, a big component of what is being sold is not the product, but support. No matter how modern or antiquated the tech is, many B2B companies don’t actually care about the experience per-se; they care about compliance, security, data integrity, and ongoing support. That’s essentially Oracle’s entire playbook!

How do LLM SaaS replacements solve that?

The position is more extreme than that. It’s your SaaS without its UI is nothing more than a database.

> The underlying SaaS platform is reduced to a “database” or “utility” that an agent can switch out if needed.

I agree that UI isn’t going away completely. Language is a slow and imprecise tool. A well developed UI can be much more efficient. I think it will be much more like the Star Trek universe, where we use a blend of the two.

In any case, if the AI agent can generate UI on the fly, it seems their point still stands?

Oh yeah I can't wait for the AI to layout the UI in an arbitrary fashion, put buttons wherever the hell it feels like it (even in a place you can neither see nor click on.). Yes please, also I would like to automate the customer service for said product so it can be a complete black box of uselessness.

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