Posted by amarsahinovic 1/10/2026
I've been doing exactly that since AI came out :-D
You absolutely can prompt your way to 3.5 nines of uptime (even more), but you need to know what you're doing and correct it.
Even very well aligned models like Opus will make traps for your infrastructure. For example you tell it to write a fluxCD implementation of some application, in your k8 cluster, following your conventions and best practices described in some md files. And it does this, very nicely. But unless you tell it in advance every detail it will do something extremely stupid mid way through.
For example, let's say you have a database and it needs to create a new instance (with gitops) for the app. It adds the new DB and it gets created, but instead of using a tool that already exists (or proposing one if it doesn't) to sync the DB access credentials from the DB na espace to the app namespace it will read the credential, encrypt it and store in the app namespace.
What's the problem with that? Well, none unless you rotate these credentials. In which case your app will stop working, possibly after you tested it and decided it's good enough to use seriously, despite having a HA DB.
There are a dozen things like this in each "ai project", but even with this. With the time needed to review everything it saves a lot of time.
This is not exclusive to FOSS. It is also the basic model of most non SaaS B2B, often for good reason referred to by the derogatory term 'consulting-ware'.
AI eats into these services, as it commoditizes them. 80%+ of what used to take a specialist for that product can now be handled by a good generalist + AI.
Leaving aside the business model impact for a second, getting rid of obfuscation incentives is intrinsically good thing for a user community.
Dries' solution, offering operations as a SaaS or managed service, is meeting a need AI can't as easily match, but not exactly for the the stated reason. What the client is actually buying is making something someone else's problem. And CIOs will always love this more than anything if they can credibly justify it.
Where AI does impact this is in that latter part. If AI does significantly commoditize operational expertise, then the cost of in-house operating is (sometimes dramatically) lowered, and thus the justification gap on the CIO side for spending outside widens. How much this will drive a decision will be highly variable between businesses and projects.
if u imagine the "business" stack as: customers on top, over business, over analysis, over software, over machines/infrastructure.. 25+ years ago i thought that DSLs and such very-high-level-mostly-formalised-descriptions will move the line between what-product-is-aka-business-analysis and software/coding towards software, reducing its part in the whole stack.
Well, it did not happen, just the opposite - instead the developers become expected to know everything from infrastructure to software to analysis to business domain and higher. So, stack became something like customers over business over... software-dev. Requirements, analysis... mostly gone / done by devs.
Now if that whole "software-dev" part collapses into zero-margin, i see two ways: either businesses very quickly resurrect the business-analysis (what the product is) and make that their margin/moat, or the customers start making their own software (as throwaway 100 wrongs is now possible) - and removing the business from the whole transaction...
Imagine I’m a company just big enough to entertain adopting Salesforce for CRM. It’s a big chunk of money, but our sales can absorb the pain.
With GenAI as an enterprise architect, one of the options I’m now recommending is to create a custom CRM for our business and skip the bloated enterprise SaaS platform.
We can gather CRM requirements fast, build fast, and deliver integrations to our other systems incredibly fast using tools like Claude Code. Our sales people can make feature requests and we can dogfood them in a few days, maybe hours.
GenAI development tools are rapidly changing how I think about enterprise software development.
If your core business is software-based offerings, your moat has been wiped out.
A handful of senior engineers can replicate any SaaS, save licensing costs, and build custom applications that were too risky in the past.
The companies that recognize what is happening and adapt will win.
When you decide to pull that in house, you are implicitly burdening yourself with the cost of the buildout as well as ongoing maintenance. True, you could probably knock together an okay v1 of CRM yourself inhouse. But are you really going to get it to and maintain production level quality over time at a lower total cost of ownership? I'm skeptical.
The theoretical party you are describing would probably be better served by simply avoiding Salesforce in favor of a next gen CRM that is both more cost effective and easier to customize. In enterprise contexts, even HubSpot is effectively next gen, but there are also products like Attio et al that have a ton of adoption and strong integration ecosystems (albeit not at the Salesforce level).
When you buy enterprise software from a vendor you are buying more than "just software" you are also hiring a company's services. And the inverse is correct as well, when you choose to build it in house, you are implicitly choosing to hire a team internally to resource all of the services you would've expected that vendor to provide.
Certainly, this tradeoff can still make a lot of sense for some companies. The acid test for that, in my opinion, is whether said company could (and would) actually successfully sell the product they build internally on the open market. If the answer to that is "yes", the prospect of turning a cost center into a profit center can potentially bear significant long term ROI to the company.
My point is the decision point has moved. Where five years ago there’d be zero discussion of building internally, those discussions are going to be very different.
I believe many tech oriented companies will pull SaaS capabilities inside and as GenAI developer tools improve, the line will keep moving.
And we don’t need SaaS professional services anymore. Claude Code replaces that entire business model.
Maybe my biggest disagreement with your view is I think it is simultaneously far too conservative and far too aggressive at the same time. Where there was previously a decision about buy vs build, I disagree with the belief that many tech oriented companies will pull SaaS capabilities inside as GenAI developer tools improve because the cost of "build" is actually not going to get comparatively cheaper compared to the risk of "buying" - if anything, the risk of "building" internally with GenAI tooling that you were considering "buying" is significantly higher unless you are prepared to truly own it, that is go head to head with the entire rest of the market focuses on building and selling that tool as their full-time corporate focus. The actual risk of owning a tool internally making allowances for GenAI tooling is a lot higher than folks realize because GenAI tooling has a lot more risk of creating vibeslop and the only way to avoid that is to be dedicated to producing that tool as one's full time job and serving the needs of the entire market that needs it in that process. This is impossible to do with an internal tool.
The flip side of that same realization is why I also believe that your view is too conservative. The company that might be more empowered to consider building Salesforce internally with better tooling is not competing with Salesforce -- they are competing with the market that is going to /takedown/ Salesforce and a future version of themselves that would've used the future successor to Salesforce. Such a company is probably not in the business of building and selling CRMs although they are likely in the business of using such a CRM. The risk of making that conflation would be to stretch existing resources thin and turn the high interest credit card of tech debt and turn it into a payday loan with GenAI vibeslop.
I do not view GenAI as a democratizer. I view it as an accelerator with the capabilities to accelerate not just "winners take all" dynamics for the top companies that invest enough to avoid vibeslop, but "losers lose all" dynamics in the supply chain for everyone else who tries to wing it to capitalize before inevitably losing against future incumbents, or try in vain to turn a legacy firm into an innovator before inevitably losing against tech debt.
Everyone likes to believe they'll be able to use these great tools to become a future incumbent. But becoming a future incumbent is something that is very hard to do unless your org + book of business + funding + tools is better than someone else's org + book of business + funding + tools. That is why I don't think it actually changes the buy vs build decision that much; the decision should probably still be to buy, it's just changing the question of what exactly should be bought.
We’re not coding. We’re orchestrating well constructed applications that follow proven principles (DDD, behavior focused, packaged business capabilities, behavior unit testing).
We’re extracting high value from GenAI.
I can tell you with near-100% certainty. This isn’t what you want to happen. Disaster in the making.
Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. There is very little competitive advantage to be gained from this type of effort in most companies.
The motto has always been, "Make it work."
Not, "Make it perfect."
Meanwhile, besides functionality, you’ll want/need to plug in the latest and greatest go to market tools for marketing -and demand gen. But… that’ll be a custom effort, too.
Along the way you’ll also realize that you’re missing out on the most common practices in the industry because you built some idiosyncratic tool that only is relevant to your company.
History may very well prove me wrong, but I think you’re underestimating the expertise that underlies these products and platforms. It’s not just code, and the costs of getting it wrong are more than just an engineer’s time. When you waste time in GTM the impacts on the business and valuation are not linear, they’re exponential.
Sounds like even more incentive for "managing" problems and creating business models around them instead of solving them.
It bothers me, too. But, look at the history of the internet. There's no reason to expect we'll be able to fix this problem.
1. Search engines drove traffic to news/content sites, which monetized via ads. Humans barely tolerate these ad filled websites. And yet, local news went into steep decline, and the big national players got an ever-larger share of attention. The large, national sites were able to keep a subscriber-based paywall model. These were largely legacy media sites (ie: NYT).
2. News sites lost the local classifieds market, as the cost of advertising online went to zero (ie: Craigslist). This dynamic was a form of creative destruction - a better solution ate the business of an older solution.
3. Blog monetization was always tough, beyond ads. Unless you were a big blog, you couldn't make a living. What about getting a small amount of money per view from random visitors? The internet never developed a micro-payment or subscription model for the set of open sites - the blogosphere, etc. The best we got were closed platforms like Substack and Medium, which could control access via paywalls.
All this led to the internet being largely funded through the "attention economy": ads mostly, paywalls & subscriptions some.
The attention economy can't sustain itself when there are fewer eyeballs:
1. Tailwind docs have to be added just once to the training set for the AI to be proficient in that framework forever. So one HTTP request, more or less, to get the docs and docs are no longer required.
2. Tailwind does change, so an AI will want to access the docs for the version its working with. This will require access at inference time. This is more analogous to visiting a site.
Right now its convenient to look at Tailwind and discuss what their doing wrong.
But eventually most other business models will be stress tested in the same way - sooner or later.
Of course, now you're opening a whole other can of worms. In the UK, only 1 in 9 Arts Council funding applications is successful.