[viccis]

Funny to read this while I'm at the Snowflake summit, where every single vendor booth, keynote talk, and about 95% of tech talks are exclusively about agentic AI. Sometimes I wonder if everyone here is just pretending to like it because they have to, like a tech prostitute telling their investor john that that AI feature is the best they've ever had, it's so good. During Tuesday's keynote, one of the speakers kept getting salty that people weren't really clapping a lot, which was the only amusing part of a slog of a keynote that opened with an AI assisted DJ making "music" that might be fit for phone hold music, if that.

I don't even categorically hate AI. I just wish I could stop fucking hearing about it. These people killed their golden goose (shitty SaaS companies that feed into the giant human centipede of tech stacks that usually just ends up being ad tech at the top) and seem really pumped about it somehow.

[LPisGood]

I keep hearing about the death of SAAS. How real is it, I wonder?

[viccis]

My company has some products that are SaaS-like, insofar as you are basically just paying us for the ability to use our services, and then some that are less SaaS-like insofar as they consist of paying for ongoing work produced by people with extremely sought after expertise. For potential customers in the first category, I'm starting to see them say, we're deciding between you, company X, company Y, and building it ourselves with AI. It's actually now a concern that any proof of value engagements will involve them just scanning the APIs and workflows to use as references for their LLM agents. Meanwhile our other products are not impacted by this at all and AI just helps them scale workloads.

We might see this die down a bit when people realize that the real reasons you don't just roll it yourself is that (a) you're paying the company to do it right and to be able to use an economy of scale to do it cheaper than you might even be able to yourself and (b) the real cost is not to build it but to maintain it.