No - aaS is not going anywhere ... for precisely the reasons you already articulated: "I have 0 desire nor inclination to replace any of the software I currently pay for either personally or through my startup"

Businesses should outsource [almost] every non-core functionality to someone else

Unless it becomes so business-critical that it absolutely positively MUST be done in-house, go to a reliable vendor and pay them for their expertise

Programmers already* do this by using libraries when they write software (yeah, you learned how to build a graph data structure and implement a binary search tree in your second or third degree year, but you have never done it since - because the versions that exist in either language-supplied or community-based libraries are just plain better)

The days of "do it all yourself" are - blessedly - decades behind us now

Use the best* tools for the job, and worry about delivering your product/service to your customers

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* "best" may vary over time - cost, language, availability, etc are all factors in determining this for you

We replaced two minor SaaS vendors this week with vibe coded alternatives, so yes I do think that it's real. Our core systems like HRIS, ERP, Github, email, etc. no and no plans to replace or foresee being able to replace those ones.

It depends on the company. In a certain sense, many SaaS products are more "software" than "service" and are therefore dead-on-arrival when competitors can undercut them or provide a local alternative. We've all seen the $10/mo AI inference apps that nobody uses, or the many transcription services that died with on-device NLP going mainstream.

So... AI accelerates the demise of stupid businesses and reinforces the value proposition of irreplaceable services. As a whole I would say that is a negative to a market that relies on "disruption" economics to stay afloat and continue raising capital.

The idea that you can write one sentence and get a masterpiece of software that meets your needs is delusional and I’m shocked that it gets as much currency as it does here.

I asked Copilot to tell me how to clear out a a RabbitMQ queue and it gave me a great answer. I asked it to write me a Python script that solves Tower of Hanoi, same thing.

In both cases it is a well-defined task and I don’t care about how it is done.

Applications software is different. If you farm out a task to offshore developers you are either going to have to document every. little. detail. (India) or get a spike of work which might get between 0-40% of the way there and come back with detailed feedback through several cycles (China)

Maybe an A.I. coder could work with you intensively to get your needs met, but it’s not going to be “implement user authentication” and then it is done unless your definition of done is launching and getting a call the next night that somebody logged in without a password.

Even so, AI does make people more productive and it will shift buy vs build discussions towards build.

Why is the text grayed out on posts like this?