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Comment by cm277 | Hacker News Reader

Same background as you and I fully agree. Again and again you see market/economic takes from technologists. This is not a technology question (yes, LLMs work), it's an economics question: what do LLMs disrupt?

If your answer is "cost of developing code" (what TFA argues), please explain how previous waves of reducing cost of code (JVM, IDEs, post-Y2K Outsourcing) disrupted the ERP/b2b market. Oh wait, they didn't. The only real disruption in ERP in the last what 30 years, has been Cloud. Which is an economics disruption, not a technological one: cloud added complexity and points of failure and yet it still disrupted a ton of companies, because it enabled new business models (SaaS for one).

So far, the only disruption I can see coming from LLMs is middleware/integration where it could possibly simplify complexity and reduce overall costs, which if anything will help SaaS (reduction of cost of complements, classic Christensen).

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I'll take a crack.

> what do LLMs disrupt? If your answer is "cost of developing code" (what TFA argues), please explain how previous waves of reducing cost of code (JVM, IDEs, post-Y2K Outsourcing) disrupted the ERP/b2b market. Oh wait, they didn't. The only real disruption in ERP in the last what 30 years, has been Cloud.

"Cost of developing code" is a trivial and incomplete answer.

Coding LLMs disrupt (or will, in the immediate future)

(1) time to develop code (with cost as a second order effect)

(2) expertise to develop code

None of the analogs you provided are a correct match for these.

A closer match would be Excel.

It improved the speed and lowered the expertise required to do what people had previously been doing.

And most importantly, as a consequence of especially the latter more types of people could leverage computing to do more of their work faster.

The risk to B2B SaaS isn't that a neophyte business analyst is going to recreate you app overnight...

... the risk is that 500+ neophyte business analysts each have a chance of replacing your SaaS app, every day, every year.

Because they only really need to get lucky once, and then the organization shifts support to in-house LLM-augmented development.

The only reason most non-technology businesses didn't do in-house custom development thus far was that ROI on employing a software development team didn't make sense for them. Suddenly that's no longer a blocker.

To the point about cloud, what did it disrupt?

(1) time to deploy code (with cost as a second order effect)

(2) expertise to deploy code

B2B SaaS should be scared, unless they're continuously developing useful features, have a deep moat, and are operating at volumes that allow them to be priced competitively.

Coding agents and custom in-house development are absolutely going to kill the 'X-for-Y' simple SaaS clone business model (anything easily cloneable).

This seems to assume that these non-technical people have the expertise to evaluate LLM/agent generated solutions.

The problem of this tooling is that it cannot deploy code on its own. It needs a human to take the fall when it generates errors that lose people money, break laws, cause harm, etc. Humans are supposed to be reviewing all of the code before it goes out but you’re assumption is that people without the skills to read code let alone deploy and run it are going to do it with agents without a human in the loop.

All those non-technical users have to do is approve that app, manage to deploy and run it themselves somehow, and wait for the security breach to lose their jobs.

I think you're underestimating (1) how bad most B2B is (from a bug and security vulnerability perspective) & (2) how little B2B companies' engineers understand about how their customers are using their products.

The frequency of mind-bogglingly stupid 1+1=3 errors (where 1+1 is a specific well-known problem in a business domain and 3 is the known answer) cuts against your 'professional SaaS can do it better' argument.

And to be clear: I'm talking about 'outsourced dev to lowest-cost resources' B2B SaaS, not 'have a team of shit-hot developers' SaaS.

The former of which, sadly, comprises the bulk of the industry. Especially after PE acquisition of products.

Furthermore, I'm not convinced that coding LLMs + scanning aren't capable of surpassing the average developer in code security. Especially since it's a brute force problem: 'ensure there's no gap by meticulously checking each of 500 things.'

Auto code scanning for security hasn't been a significant area of investment because the benefits are nebulous. If you already must have human developers writing code, then why not have them also review it?

In contrast, scanning being a requirement to enabling fast-path citizen-developer LLM app creation changes the value proposition (and thus incentive to build good, quality products).

It's been mentioned in other threads, but Fire/Supabase-style 'bolt-on security-critical components' is the short term solution I'd expect to evolve. There's no reason from-scratch auth / object storage / RBAC needs to be built most of the time.

I’m just imagining the sweat on the poor IT managers’ brow.

They already lock down everything enterprise wide and hate low-code apps and services.

But in this day and age, who knows. The cynical take is that it doesn’t matter and nobody cares. Have your remaining handful of employees generate the software they need from the magic box. If there’s a security breach and they expose customer data again… who cares?

That sweat doesn't lessen dealing with nightmare fly-by-night vendors for whatever business application a department wants.

Sometimes, the devil you know is preferable -- at least then you control the source.

Folks fail to realize the status quo is often the status quo because it's optimal for a historical set of conditions.

Previously... what would your average business user be able to do productively with an IDE? Weighed against security risks? And so the point that was established.

If suddenly that business user can add substantial amounts of value to the org, I'd be very surprised if that point doesn't shift.

It matters AND...

Yeah. I used to manage a team that built a kind of low-code SaaS solution to several big enterprise clients. I sat in on several calls with our sales people and the customer’s IT department.

They liked buying SAP or M$ because it was fully integrated and turnkey. Every SaaS vendor they added had to be SOC2, authenticate with SAML, and each integration had to be audited… it was a lot of work for them.

And we were highly trained, certified developers. I had to sign documents and verify our stack with regulatory consultants.

I just don’t see that fear going away with agents and LLM prompts from frontline workers who have no training in IT security, management, etc. There’s a reason why AI tech needs humans in the loop: to take the blame when they thumbs up what it outputs.

>> 2) expertise to develop code

This is wrong. Paradoxically, you need expertise to develop code with LLM.

For LOB CRUD apps? We blew past that capability point months ago.

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