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Comment by alwillis | Hacker News Reader

> Unlikely. The future will be some people will do this, but honestly I think it will largely be people who were already tinkering with building things, whether full on software development or not

Billions of dollars of stock market value disappeared because of the concern AI can create core SaaS functionality for corporations instead of them spending millions of dollars in licensing fees to SAP, Microsoft, etc.

This not about tinkering.

SaaS As We Know It Is Dead: How To Survive The SaaS-pocalypse! - https://www.forrester.com/blogs/saas-as-we-know-it-is-dead-h...

Why SaaS Stocks Have Dropped—and What It Signals for Software’s Next Chapter - https://www.bain.com/insights/why-saas-stocks-have-dropped-a...

Jim Cramer says AI fears have made the stock market fragile - https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/23/jim-cramer-says-ai-fears-hav...

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Did you see the network security stock sell-off after Anthropic announced a code security analysis feature? There's a sliver of nothing between mob mentality and wisdom of the crowd.

It's too soon to bother making predictions. Shits gonna be wild for the next few years, then some type of market correction will happen, and we'll start to get an idea of how things will actually look.

Can we please have some calm, stable, boring years please, before I'm dead? The last 5 years have already been "wild" enough. The world is unrecognizable. I'm unprepared for further wildness.

Excluding the batshit insane political side, I don't actually think it's been as nuts as people think, or at least not uniformly so.

I have a lot of friends in the tech sector, but outside the FANNG/silicone valley/startup bubbles. It's been largely business as normal across the board. Twitter and social media warps our perspective I think.

there was a whole pandemic

And there’s still biggest war in Europe since ww2. Israel and Gaza. Iran standoff. Tariffs.

Not really whole. COVID was at best like a quarter pandemic.

Stow the propaganda. 1) it's not over, the pandemic continues and will likely continue for a long time 2) it's already the fifth deadliest pandemic in known history. "Quarter pandemic" is an insane thing to think let alone say out loud.

1. It is pretty much over. Covid has become (for me at least) indistinguishable from a common cold.

2. Gemini says covid-19 killed 0.086% of world population (over several years). That's about as mild as it gets. More than sharks, but less than anything that usually kills people, like air polution (estimated about 0.095% yearly), cancer (est 0.12% every damn year) or cardiovascular disease (est 0.25% a year). Peak covid was still killing less than business-as-usual cancer or cardiovascular disease.

As far as pandemics go, the deadliest ones kill double digit percentage of people who contract them. That's two orders of magnitude more than covid. Even the single-digit percentage pandemics must be extremely rough. We were lucky[0].

[0]: Not the ones who died or have lasting consequences, but "we" as humanity, were rather lucky with covid. It could've been something much worse.

It depends where you lived. In my city (harshest/longest restrictions in the world), we were not allowed to leave the house for more than 30 minutes a day for 2.5 years unless we were out buying groceries. No large gatherings allowed at our homes. Mask usage enforced everywhere in public.

In the city in my country reknowned for having a much higher level of hypochrondria before the pandemic, imagine the mental health issues my city is going through now.

Ok, sure, but that's a political/social problem, rather than the pandemic.

How many dead bodies you need to see to even flinch? Millions not enough?

One is enough to make me flinch. But the 7 millions are just a statistic, and a drop in the bucket compared to cancer or cardiovascular disease.

Cancer and heart disease together kill the same number of people as the whole covid pandemic every 10-12 days.

The market is losing its shit over this because people are operating on the thesis that "AI will be able to ..." rather than "AI can demonstrably do ...". At some point they're all gonna get margin called on their futurisms. It would be a lot better if, before getting excited, we ask to see experimental results. So you say you have a world-beating security tool? Show me something it can do that all the other ones can't. That would be worth getting excited about, not a vague blog post about vibes and dreams.

But then the sellers wouldn’t find the useful idiots to sell their snake oil to.

There are other businesses models than pump-and-dump, they could try it!

>Billions of dollars of stock market value disappeared because of the concern

That's really the key, right there. The value disappeared because of concern, not of anything real.

When ungodly amounts of money is governed entirely by vibes, it's hardly surprising they lose ungodly amounts of money to vibe-coding.

The downside is the effects of all that money shifting is very real :(

> That's really the key, right there. The value disappeared because of concern, not of anything real.

The value also only existed in the first place because of belief, in future work, operations, profits, etc.

Like it or not, confidence in institutions is society. Concern that affects that confidence is as real as any other societal effect.

That's because of P/E and how future earnings work.

If the P/E = 1 then there would be no sell-off. Looks at utility stocks with divs, they don't sell off [as sharply] when there is AI news.

Oh no Bain and Jim Cramer think software is dead. All that is is a signal to buy software stocks

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