Posted by jnord 12/14/2025
At the same time, to the core theme of the article - do any of us think a small sassy SaaS like Bingo card creator could take off now? :-)
https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/selling_s...
The first company was a low margin business that sent home health care nurses to special needs kids and reimbursements came from Medicaid.
I was hired by the new director to modernize their aging in house Electronic Medical System built on FoxPro 1999 running on SQL Server 2000 - in 2016.
They had two “developers” who had been their for 10 and 20 years respectively who only knew Sql Server and FoxPro.
They also had some other software.
After doing some assessments of the situation, my report to the director and the CTO was that this company should not try to support a software development department and hire new people. Their margins are too small to be competitive or to keep people.
I suggested we outsource everything to other consulting companies - not staff augmentation. Let the consulting company do the entire implementation based on a Statement of Work.
The two “developers” role changed to “data analyst”. Even with AI I would have said the same thing today. Not every company needs to try to do software engineering. Every company does need to understand its data. [1]
The next company was a startup. I was adamant about blocking every developer who suggested any internal tool that we could get a well known SaaS to do or where AWS had a service that wasn’t firefly related to our product. To use the cliche - anything “that didn’t make the beer taste better”. My opinion wouldn’t have changed with AI.
The last thing I want is a bunch of bespoke internal vibe coded AI Slop that we have to support that is not in service to the product when we can find a reputable third party product.
And no that doesn’t mean I am going to trust some unknown one person SaaS company.
[1] 18 months into the job, I walked into the director’s office and told him, “let’s be honest, you all don’t need me anymore”. I purposefully put myself out of job. But boy did I have a story to tell during behavioral interviews at my next job at the startup and my interview for my job at BigTech after I left the startup.
It's not the hackernews i knew even 3 years ago anymore and i'm seriously close to just ditching the site after 15+ years of use.
I use AI heavily but everyday there's crazy optimistic almost manic posts about how AI is going to take over various sectors that are completely ludicrous - and they are all filled with comments from bizarrely optimistic people that have seemingly no knowledge of how software is actually run or built, ie. it's the human organisational, research and management elements that are the hard parts, something AI can't do in any shape or form at the moment for any complex or even small company.
I think that _developers_ might be reaching for more LLM-built tools instead of SaaS in some cases and I also can believe that plenty of people _think_ they are vibe-coding up alternatives to SaaSes they pay for but I think those people are going to have a bad time when it eventually collapses (the tool they made, not talking about the AI bubble).
I'm not anti-LLM (not in the slightest) and you can sometimes (it's not a given) get to 80-90% of an existing product/service with vibe-coding or LLM-assisted development but that last 10-20% (and especially that last 1-5%) are where it gets hard. Really hard.
It's the typical "you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially"-mentality IMHO. I feel this myself all the time, even before LLMs, "Oh, I could clone this easily!" and in many cases I could or even did... or at least I cloned the easy/basic/happy-path version that eschewed a whole slew of features I didn't need/care for. But then the complexity started to set in. [0]
I have the same feeling for things I'm not even trying to clone, just build from scratch. I put together a cookbook for friends and family recently and used LLMs to help write essentially a static site generator to read my JSON data I created (some with the help of LLMs) and render it out as HTML (which I then turned into a PDF). My mind started to run with "Hmm, could I create a product out of this? It was relatively easy to get started..." but then reality set in and I remembered all the little tweaks I had to do (shorten a title here, reduce padding there, etc to make everything fit and look good). Sure, I got 80% of the way there in the first or second iteration of it using LLMs but there was plenty of massaging that had to happen to turn it into something usable that I could send to a printer.