Comment by martinald | Hacker News Reader

Comment by martinald | Hacker News Reader

I sort of agree with this, but what a lot of people are missing is it's unbelievably easy to clone a lot of SaaS products.

So I think big SaaS products are under attack from three angles now:

1) People replacing certain systems with 'vibe coded' ones, for either cost/feature/unhappiness with vendor reasons. I actually think this is a bigger threat than people think - there are so many BAD SaaS products out there which cost businesses a fortune in poor features/bugs/performance/uptime, and if the models/agents keep improving the way they have in the last couple of years it's going to be very interesting if some sort of '1000x' engineer in an agent can do crazy impressive stuff.

2) Agents 'replacing' the software. As people have pointed out, just have the agent use APIs to do whatever workflow you want - ping a database and output a report.

3) "Cheap" clones of existing products. A tiny team can now clone a "big" SaaS product very quickly. These guys can provide support/infra/migration assistance and make money at a much lower price point. Even if there is lock in, it makes it harder for SaaS companies to keep price pressure up.

But have you ever tried to clone a product or tool for yourself before? At first it’s great because you think that you saved money but then you start having to maintain it… fixing problems, filling in gaps… you now realize that you made a mistake. Just because AI can do it now doesn’t mean you aren’t just now having to use AI to do the same thing…

Also, agents are not deterministic. If you use it to analyze data, it will get it right most of the time but, once in a blue moon, it will make shit up, except you can’t tell which time it was. You could make it deterministic by having AI write a tool instead… except you now have the first problem of maintaining a tool.

That isn’t to say that there isn’t small low hanging fruit that AI will replace, but it’s a bit different when you need a real product with support.

At the end of the day, you hire a plumber or use a SaaS not because you can’t do it yourself, but because you don’t want to do it and rather want someone else who is committed to it to handle it.

I'm not saying _the end user_ clones it. I mean someone else does (more efficiently with agents) and runs it as a _new_ SaaS company. They would provide support just like the existing one would, but arguably at a cheaper price point.

And regarding agents being non deterministic, if they write a bunch of SQL queries to a file for you, they are deterministic. They can just write "disposable" tools and scripts - not always doing it thru their context.

But isn’t this what the article is saying? Even with AI you’re still not going to build your own payroll/ERP/CRM.

The challenge to this is that so much of the difficulty in getting people to switch products is trust, and a couple of people running saas with claude code has no differentiation and no durability.

I think it will be a little different: black box the thing, testable inputs and outputs, and then go to town for a week or two until it is reasonable. Then open source it. Too big/complex for an agent? Break down the black box into reasonable ideas that could comprise it and try again. You can replace many legacy products and just open source the thing. If the customer can leave behind some predatory-priced garbage for a solution where they get the code I think they would be a lot more likely to pay for help managing/setting it up.

Insightful points!

It would be interesting if, with all the anxiety about vibe coding becoming the new normal, its only lasting effect is the emergence of smaller B2B companies that quickly razzle dazzle together a bespoke replacement for Concur, SAP, Workday, the crappy company sharepoint - whatever. Reminds me of what people say Palantir is doing, but now supercharged by the AI-driven workflows to stand up the “forward deployed” “solution” even faster.

Thanks,yes exactly what I think.

Or an industry specific Workday, with all of workdays features but aimed at a niche vertical.

I wrote about this (including an approach on how to clone apps with HAR files and agents) if you are interested. https://martinalderson.com/posts/attack-of-the-clones/

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