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Comment by p2detar | Hacker News Reader

Why would it stop with just developer layoffs? When software companies rely on LLM providers to run their business, I’d argue we‘ll see a massive bust of these companies around the world - from on-prem products to SaaS.

Customers may build the software they need entirely in-house or via prompt-engineer consultants, without the need to buy software tools like today. It could be a very very different world.

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> Customers may build the software they need entirely in-house or via prompt-engineer consultants, without the need to buy software tools like today. It could be a very very different world.

Already happening. I know of a few places that have gotten such large gains from LLMs that they know have their engineers working on creating homegrown ports of popular services (Docker etc.).

It seems to me that Docker should be far, far down the list on services to recreate in-house with AI.

But since it's open source the AI is trained on it so it can actually do it :D

Why would you create a homegrown port of Docker? Docker the container software, or Dockerhub the image repository? This is just confusing. If you didn't want to use Docker there is a perfectly good well tested alternative called Podman with wide adoption.

Homegrown ports of calendly or jira seem feasible, and arguably a good business decision. Homegrown versions of docker seem ridiculous as a starting point, even if its possible to do today there is much lower hanging fruit to go after first.

Oh. Oh my. In-house Docker gives me hope for my future as a cleanup consultant.

> I know of a few places that have gotten such large gains from LLMs that they know have their engineers working on creating homegrown ports of popular services (Docker etc.).

Sounds like a good way to eventually erase those gains.

Not sure about Docker (lol) but stakeholders are definitely more open to "building your own" now. It used to be that to be agile as a business you would seek out already built software and rent it, as it typically was cheaper than building and maintaining your own (I say typically due to stuff like vendor lock-in and such). But these days, and especially in 2026 with the widespread use of agents and harnesses, that formula has started to change. Even though the SOTA models are really good now, it's the harness and the "fluff" around the model that makes it a game changer. The developer is no longer the one writing or even gluing the code together, the harness does that. Pair that with context preserving mechanisms and tools that emerged (automatic context compaction, AGENTS, TOOLS, MCP...) and you can get to a state where you start a new thread in Codex and it knows your systems, your dbs, can smartly explore code it doesn't know and db data patterns etc., it can explain stuff to a new developer (and be correct most of the time and have time to spend on the developer)... all of which SIGNIFICANTLY reduces the risk you take on yourself as a company when you "build your own". What's $10k/year to any half-working semi-profitable company? Nothing. But in 2026, you can build and maintain A TON of software for that, much more than your "average IT needs" company may ever use.

I'm sure the very large (and very small) businesses will keep their absolute need for (or the lack of) inhouse developers, but everything in between will probably get compressed to one or two inhouse architects in direct contact with the stakeholders and the rest will be contractors working with Codex-like automation.

This won't happen in most cases because the valuable thing is largely the knowledge encoded in the software, which the buyers of the software don't have and don't want to have since they're focused on their own business.

There's also, of course, the not insignificant value in the software itself actually working, being operated, being updated when necessary, all of that. Again just extra hassle no business will want to shoulder when they can just buy something that does it for them.

Why would I build my own CRM instead of paying 50k a year or whatever? The engineer plus tokens for maintenance will cost you way more than 50k.

These people are delusional and just repeating delusional vibe coder tweets.

Not every business has $50k for a CRM

Hell, there is a lot of really good open source software that fits most peoples needs already, that can be self hosted and costs nothing but the running of it. But people still pay for the SaaS product. Because you're not just paying for software. you're paying for support, uptime, compliance etc. These people think that SaaS is dead confuse me.

agreed. Also, data security, data compliance, legal, customer support, operations... Yeah, SaaS is not going anywhere soon.

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