[fontain]

“What happens to the SaaS markets when the cost of code approaches zero?” … “Few people truly grasp how hard bringing a software product to market is.”

Are these related? The difficulty of bringing a software product to market has never been that it takes time to produce code. We’ve had the concept of MVPs for decades and pre-AI companies have raised hundreds of millions off of no code prototypes.

YC has always preached that you launch. Launch today. Launch as soon as is humanly possible. And learn. And iterate. You get something into the market as soon as possible. Spending years building the perfect software has never been the strategy pursued by technology startups, and not because of the time it takes, but because you need users to know what to build.

I think we could even go as far as to counter your argument. We know that constraints are powerful. Constraints force us to focus. Imagine you decide to build an ATS. You spend a bunch of money on Claude Code to generate hundreds of features, every little idea you can think of, you include it. You launch with the most complete ATS on the market. Ashby can’t hold a candle to the depth of your software. Do you have a better chance of success than if you had launched with a much smaller surface area, experimented, found the right area of focus, and iterated according to user behavior?

I encounter a lot of vibe coded software products that people are launching and I am not precious about code, a good product is a good product whether it was hand crafted over a decade by a thousand well paid programmers or generated in an afternoon by Claude Code from a laypersons prompt. I can name one single vibe coded product I pay for that is genuinely good software. All that the AI age has done is show that most of us absolutely suck at building products, and that even with free code, what we produce is garbage.

“How could the market afford to build and sustain each offering?”

I think you’re conflating build and sustain here. Nothing fundamental about business has changed. Sustaining a business isn’t about being able to generate code. Even in a world where code is free, how could the market sustain 10,000 Ashbys? Where are the customers coming from?

As a concrete example: how many customers does Jira have despite Linear being better software in every single way? Would generating 1,000 more Linears change Jira’s market position? Or Microsoft Teams, Teams is awful, there are so many better options. Will generating 1,000 more better options change Microsoft Teams’s position?

[brettgriffin]

The P&L of every software company has an R&D expense (R) in a total cost (T). We can debate what R is, and R might be approaching 0, but it is not 0.

This does not mean that R is on the only cost (T-R grows over the life of the company). It does not mean that, even if R were 0, you could launch a product. But R is a real cost.

[fontain]

“I do believe that cost of producing code is approaching to zero, and that means hundreds or even thousands of offerings will exist in every shape, way and form we can imagine.”

What proportion of T does R need to be to see thousands of Ashbys appear?

Ashby is a good example to discuss because it is serious software for serious businesses, it isn’t a calorie counting app. Serious business expects so much more out of their suppliers than software, Ashby is so much more than a bunch of code.

So, a thousand people generate their own ashbys, then what? Are companies like Shopify and Ramp going to trust their ATS to some person who generated some software in a day?

I agree that the cost of building software has gone down a lot and that lowers the barrier to entry for building a software business. I completely disagree that the market could support even 10x the number of companies in each vertical, let alone 100x or 1000x.

You could clone Ashby today and go to Ramp and offer them a 50% discount on whatever they’re paying Ashby and there is zero chance you win their business. You could clone Ashby and the add 10x the features and go to ramp and offer a 75% discount and there is zero chance of you winning their business.