alt Hacker NewsSame background as you and I fully agree. Again and again you see market/economic takes from technologists. This is not a technology question (yes, LLMs work), it's an economics question: what do LLMs disrupt?
If your answer is "cost of developing code" (what TFA argues), please explain how previous waves of reducing cost of code (JVM, IDEs, post-Y2K Outsourcing) disrupted the ERP/b2b market. Oh wait, they didn't. The only real disruption in ERP in the last what 30 years, has been Cloud. Which is an economics disruption, not a technological one: cloud added complexity and points of failure and yet it still disrupted a ton of companies, because it enabled new business models (SaaS for one).
So far, the only disruption I can see coming from LLMs is middleware/integration where it could possibly simplify complexity and reduce overall costs, which if anything will help SaaS (reduction of cost of complements, classic Christensen).
I'll take a crack.
> what do LLMs disrupt? If your answer is "cost of developing code" (what TFA argues), please explain how previous waves of reducing cost of code (JVM, IDEs, post-Y2K Outsourcing) disrupted the ERP/b2b market. Oh wait, they didn't. The only real disruption in ERP in the last what 30 years, has been Cloud.
"Cost of developing code" is a trivial and incomplete answer.
Coding LLMs disrupt (or will, in the immediate future)
(1) time to develop code (with cost as a second order effect)
(2) expertise to develop code
None of the analogs you provided are a correct match for these.
A closer match would be Excel.
It improved the speed and lowered the expertise required to do what people had previously been doing.
And most importantly, as a consequence of especially the latter more types of people could leverage computing to do more of their work faster.
The risk to B2B SaaS isn't that a neophyte business analyst is going to recreate you app overnight...
... the risk is that 500+ neophyte business analysts each have a chance of replacing your SaaS app, every day, every year.
Because they only really need to get lucky once, and then the organization shifts support to in-house LLM-augmented development.
The only reason most non-technology businesses didn't do in-house custom development thus far was that ROI on employing a software development team didn't make sense for them. Suddenly that's no longer a blocker.
To the point about cloud, what did it disrupt?
(1) time to deploy code (with cost as a second order effect)
(2) expertise to deploy code
B2B SaaS should be scared, unless they're continuously developing useful features, have a deep moat, and are operating at volumes that allow them to be priced competitively.
Coding agents and custom in-house development are absolutely going to kill the 'X-for-Y' simple SaaS clone business model (anything easily cloneable).