[OccamsMirror]

> otherwise your clients are going to vibe code a custom solution instead of paying you.

How many things do you want to be responsible for? How many vibe coded projects do you want to maintain?

I think this line of reasoning is overblown. Just because you can doesn't mean a significant number of people will. I think the 3D printer comparison is apt.

[eloisant]

Individuals and SMB might stick with Saas but those don't pay much.

Enterprise customers have the means to develop in house, those are the customers that will leave. And those are the whales of the Saas business.

[OccamsMirror]

They already have the means to develop in house. Why aren't they?

[chasd00]

Same story as always, writing the code in the easy part. Requirement gathering, analysis, consensus, direction, those are all the hard parts. Enterprises have a business to run and don’t want to run a software shop on top of everything else.

[ImPostingOnHN]

The story is usually that businesses don't want to commit to indefinitely expending their limited efforts maintaining software which isn't part of the company's core competencies. Most of the cost and effort of software happens after the first release is delivered.

> Enterprises have a business to run and don’t want to run a software shop on top of everything else.

It sounds like you mostly understand here. The biggest part of "running a software shop" they want to avoid is responsibility for support, bugs, fires, ongoing maintenance, and legal issues, of post-release software.

Dave's Pizza around the corner doesn't make a social media app, not because Dave can't figure it out, not because he can't vibe code one, not because he can't contract someone to do it, but because running a social media site isn't a core competency of Dave's Pizza. Instead, Dave uses existing social media sites, and focuses his efforts and passions on making pizza.

[chasd00]

So I work in enterprise tech. consulting, my current project is with a large, global, chemicals company (it wouldn't be right to call out my client by name). This client is extremely competent from their multiple enterprise architects down to their analysts, they're a pleasure to work with. One of the business requirements could be met by a very simple in-house developed and hosted API, it's a perfect use case for GenAI assisted coding too. There's no magic, it's a problem solved over and over already. However, they don't want to touch inhouse dev with a 10 foot pole for the reasons we're both talking about. They don't want to support it, extend it, back it up, monitor it, and all the other things that have to happen after the code is done. They're perfectly happy to buy licenses from a saas so if anything goes wrong they can tell the CTO "it's not me, it's them". And when the CTO says "why doesn't it do this too!?!" they can say "i'll call our rep and ask".

saas value to an enterprise is more than just the functionality provided and I think that is lost on a lot of the heads down software devs here.

[Gormo]

They are, and always have. Looking over "software engineer" roles in my local area, I see folks at companies in a variety of industries: finance, health, logistics, health care, and the local power utility, all well outside the software industry.

Most enterprise companies don't develop everything in house, but usually do have a varied mix of in-house infrastructure, IaaS and PaaS solutions, and SaaS products. Large organizations across varied industries often have multiple internal dev teams, and the availability of increasingly sophisticated AI tools is going to enable the same teams to be effective at more, and more complex, projects. AI will definitely start shifting make-or-buy decisions, especially for mature, commodity use cases, to 'make'.

[eloisant]

This is much less work (= cheaper) to develop in-house with AI now than before.

[OccamsMirror]

I don't think it's much cheaper. Writing some code to do some CRUD has always been easy. Getting to a proof of concept is definitely quicker. But creating something that can be relied upon in production? That's as difficult and time consuming as it has ever been.

[habinero]

Yup. I've explained it as okay, some software is free as in beer and others are free as in speech. DIY software is free as in yacht.

It sounds nice, but now you have something that takes an enormous amount of time and effort to use and maintain, plus you need to have someone with the skills to run it.

[runako]

They won’t, because specialization is a key aspect of capitalism.

This is why companies outsource anything. Google, Inc. is big enough to own farms and ranches to grow the food eaten in its cafeterias. They could make trucks to transport that food. They could operate factories to make cutlery, etc. Why do they instead choose to pay layers of margins to layers of middlemen?

Absurd example? How about Apple? They outsource production of their chips, instead of capturing the margin they are currently gifting to their partners. Why?

Delta Airlines doesn’t operate oil fields or even refineries even though a major cost of their operations is jet fuel. Why?

Once you can reason through these very simple examples, you will understand why enterprises are unlikely to walk away from SaaS.

[codytruscott]

Delta owns and operates a refinery.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trainer_Refinery

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/delta-air-lines-refi...

[runako]

Sigh.

s/Delta/United/ or s/Delta/Southwest/ or s/Delta/Lufthansa/. Or if you prefer, s/refinery/oilfield, or s/refinery/pipeline. Or even s/refinery/farm/ because Delta also buys food in vast quantities (I would not be surprised to find they have interests in ag producers that offset a small % of their food purchases, which does not diminish the argument).

Delta also does not make airplanes, jet engines, seats, radios, GPS, glass, or even wires. They don't distill the spirits they serve on their flights. They don't own and operate a satellite Internet capability. They don't even make movies for in-flight entertainment.

The point is that Delta, like most successful firms, outsources key aspects of core service delivery.

The second article you linked says plainly that the refinery is an offset/hedge. QED Delta still outsources the vast majority of its fuel costs. (They could, for example, own large swathes of the Permian and do E&P as well. They choose to leave that to others.)

[Gormo]

Vertical integration has been a common practice in industry for 150 years. Yes, very few firms fully control their upstream supply chains, but very few conversely produce nothing but their core market offering in-house. Most companies are somewhere in between, doing some things in-house, and obtaining other things from vendors.

Most large firms have in-house software dev teams responsible for at least some portion of their development work. I know software engineers locally working, variously, at banks, pet supply distributors, power companies, soft drink bottlers, and many other non-tech industries. And AI can and will extend these teams' capacity to internally manager larger segments of their companies' tech stacks.

[duncangh]

Lmao I love this flavor of the ‘tism that always surfaces in hn comment threads exactly like this. Like moths to a flame

[chii]

> How many vibe coded projects do you want to maintain?

here comes the next SaaS idea - vibe coded services as a service. You tell what service you want, may be point out a couple examples, and you get that service vibe coded and hosted for you for a small monthly fee!

[hvb2]

I think you missed the point. Being responsible for a vibe coded product means also being able to support it and handle outages etcetera.

So, no, hosting LLM output is not the same as being responsible