alt Hacker NewsI often give the follow analogy which I think is a good proxy to what is going on.
Spreadsheets! They are everywhere. In fact, they are so abundant these days that that many are spawned for a quick job and immediately discarded. In fact, the cost of having these spreadsheets is practically zero so in many cases one may find themselves having hundreds if not thousands of them sitting around with no indication to ever being deleted. Spreadsheets are also personal and annoying especially when forced upon you (since you did not make it yourself). Spreadsheets are also programming for non-programmers.
These new vibe-coded tools are essentially the new spreadsheets. They are useful,... for 5 minutes. They are also easily forgettable. They are also personal (for the person who made them) and hated (by everyone else). I have no doubt in my mind that organisation will start using more and more of these new types of software to automate repetitive tasks, improve existing processes and so on but ultimately, apart from perhaps just a few, none will replace existing, purpose-built systems.
Ultimately you can make your own pretty dashboard that nobody else will see or use because when the cost of production is so low your users will want to create their own version because they would think they could do better.
After all, how hard is to prompt harder then the previous person?
Also, do you really think that SaaS companies are not deploying AI themselves? It is practically an arms race: the non-expert plus some AI vs 10 specialist developers plus their AIs doing this all day long.
Who is going to have the upper-hand?
Replies
I mostly agree. What it does do is raise the bar for a viable SaaS, and seeing some examples elsewhere in this thread, that’s a good thing.
I’d also add a number of the vibe tools tech adjacent people on my team have made are used and liked by the team. Even engineering likes them because it frees up their time to work on customer facing things.
There are SO MANY Excel sheets someone automated a decade+ ago still used in essential parts of the government and big corporations.
Nobody knows how they work, very few have the skills or time to edit them or check them. People just use them for the convenience.
The magic sauce of Excel is that it's free an scriptable (programmable even). If you want a SaaS, you need to involve IT, Legal, your supervisors and it's a whole-ass thing of contracts and shit.
Excel? It's just there.
There are so many stories and anecdotes of people being in stupid data entry jobs, getting bored and finding out their whole job can be automated with a single smartly done Excel sheet. Then they press F9 once per day and do something else for the rest of the time =)
And just because, my main gripe about Excel: there are no unit tests or validators for it. There's no easy way to programmatically confirm that Cell C5 has the same formula as C875
If (when?) people start AI-coding the things they used to use Excel for, we might get some actual tests and validation to confirm what the code is supposed to actually happens.