alt Hacker News> For one thing, the threat model assumes customers can build their own tools.
That's not the threat model. The threat model is that they won't have to - at some point which may not be right now. End users want to get their work done, not learn UIs and new products. If they can get their analysis/reports based on excels which are already on SharePoint (or wherever), they'd want just that. You can already see this happening.
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The president of a company I work with is a youngish guy who has no technical skills, but is resourceful. He wanted updated analytic dashboards, but there’s no dev capacity for that right now. So he decided he was going to try his hand at building his own dashboard using Lovable, which is one of these AI app making outfits. I sent him a copy of the dev database and a few markdown files with explanations regarding certain trickier elements of the data structure and told him to give them to the AI, it will know what they mean. No updates yet, but I have every confidence he’ll figure it out.
Think about all the cycles this will save. The CEO codes his own dashboards. The OP has a point.
The Excel holy grail. Dashboard are an abstraction, SaaS is an abstraction of an abstraction from the pov of customers suffering from a one size fits all. Shell scripts generated by LLMs that send automated a customized reports via email will make a lot of corporate heros. No need to login, learn and use the SaaS in many instances for decisions makers.
Yes. This is also why trying to add an AI agent chat into one's product is a fool's errand - the whole point of having general-purpose conversational AI is to turn the product into just another feature.
It's an ugly truth product owners never wanted to hear, and are now being forced to: nobody wants software products or services. No one really wants another Widgetify of DoodlyD.oo.io or another basic software tool packaged into bespoke UI and trying to make itself a command center of work in their entire domain. All those products and services are just standing between the user and the thing the user actually wants. The promise of AI agents for end-users is that of having a personal secretary, that deals with all the product UI/UX bullshit so the user doesn't have to, ultimately turning these products into tool calls.