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Comment by somenameforme | Hacker News Reader

The logical endgame (which I do not think we will necessarily reach) would be the end of software development as a career in itself.

Instead software development would just become a tool anybody could use in their own specific domain. For instance if a manager needs some employee scheduling software, they would simply describe their exact needs and have software customized exactly to their needs, with a UI that fits their preference, ready to go in no time, instead of finding some SaaS that probably doesn't fit exactly what they want, learning how to use it, jumping through a million hoops, dealing with updates you don't like, and then paying a perpetual rent on top of all of this.

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Writing the code has never been the hard part for the vast majority of businesses. It's become an order of magnitude cheaper, and that WILL have effects. Businesses that are selling crud apps will falter.

But your hypothetical manager who needs employee scheduling software isn't paying for the coding, they're paying for someone to _figure out_ their exact needs, and with a UI that fits their preference, ready to go in no time.

I've thought a lot about this and I don't think it'll be the death of SaaS. I don't think it's the death of a software engineer either — but a major transformation of the role and the death if your career _if you do not adapt_, and fast.

Agentic coding makes software cheap, and will commoditize a large swath of SaaS that exists primarily because software used to be expensive to build and maintain. Low-value SaaS dies. High-value SaaS survives based on domain expertise, integrations, and distribution. Regulations adapt. Internal tools proliferate.

> they're paying for someone to _figure out_ their exact needs,

Back in the 1980s this was called "systems analysis". The role disappeared a bit before the web came along, and coders were tasked with the job or told to just guess what the exact needs are, which is why so much software is trash.

I don't know, though, Claude Opus is most of the way to being a good systems analyst, and early reports say that having an AI provide descriptions/requirements to a fleet of code-writing AIs gives better results than having a human do it.

Also people aren't going to stop paying some negligible sum for reliable software and opt for a vibe coded pile of code that breaks with every other edge case. SaaS definitely isn't getting replaced imo.

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