[kaydub]

Companies are putting a ton of effort into getting to that point of having agents do the work unsupervised. Whoever gets there first is going to be the winner.

I personally don't think it's possible and I haven't written a line of code since Sept 2025.

There's an AI psychosis going on right now, especially among the execs or management class, and we all gotta nod our heads in agreement and burn through tokens.

[_pdp_]

Agents already run unsupervised, and they can code unsupervised too. The real question is what worthwhile work we should point these capabilities at. Nobody has really cracked that yet.

[theturtletalks]

The same worthwhile things we were working on before agents. I’m personally using them to autonomously build open-source Shopify for every vertical. I set out building it before AI, but AI actually makes the dream feel achievable.

[Schiendelman]

Have you got booked revenue for any of those verticals, using your system?

[theturtletalks]

Yes we have provided custom storefronts for people running the SaaS on-prem and we have a handful of people using our cloud hosting. This is all without any marketing efforts and word of mouth. Albeit, we launched the Shopify alternative in Dec 2025 and the Toast alternative in May 2026. The gym and grocery ones in the works.

My main goal is to first get all of these open-source alternatives to start building themselves autonomously using loops and a Hermes-like scheduler before I focused on marketing. This is almost complete.

For marketing, we are building a GTM engine using an open-source CRM (Twenty). We have LLMs use the Twenty CRM API to bring in leads from X, LinkedIn, and the Web.

The cloud hosting is not the only monetization. We’re going to use these open-source SaaS to build a decentralized, interoperable marketplace where the people actually bring value, the sellers, can sell without those rent-seeking entities like Amazon taking a piece of every sale. LLMs are already going to start jumping across these marketplace moats.

The other monetization is going to be letting agents actually run these SaaS and see if they run a business autonomously. Like VendBench but an actual online business. I’m thinking of starting a designer brand, connecting to a POD (print on demand) and then let the agent create seasonal lines, handle customer service, and make sure orders are going to the POD and being processed. Doing this with restaurants and other verticals will probably need some human supervision.

[mgh95]

Interesting. Where is this product located? If I'm looking at your profile correctly, this appears to be Openship[1], which is just a collection of starter templates from something from Nextjs and something called Keystone for each vertical. Is this what it is you are talking about?

I'm very curious how much revenue this is generating.

[1] https://github.com/openshiporg

[theturtletalks]

Yes, it’s built on the shoulders of giants, Next.js[0] and lesser-known Keystone.js[1].

Next is a full stack framework and Keystone is a CMS built on top of Prisma and GraphQL. Keystone was created by this Australian company called Thinkmill. They have used it to help businesses build custom backend systems for more than a decade. But it needed to be deployed separately from Next and they were using emotion css for their dashboard and I wanted to use Tailwind/Shadcn. So first, I had to make the Next Keystone Starter that brought in Keystone into Next so each SaaS is just 1 Next app with a built-in storefront, GraphQL API, and dashboard.

Once that was built (and it took a while tbh), I started to build the Shopify and Toast alternative. But the itch to get these built quickly and autonomously had me working on the harness in the past months and now that is nearly complete.

Here is the e-commerce[2] and restaurant[3] repos. They have a link to deployed demos you can check out as well.

As far as revenue, I don’t feel comfortable relaying that right now. We have other revenue streams like fractional CTO where companies give us equity to manage all their tech and that is quite hard to quantify. Before Openfronts being built, I built Openship, and e-commerce OMS and that has exceeded 5M orders processed since its inception in 2019. That’s not counting orders by businesses running it on-prem.

I actually posted about this vision on HN[4] when I launched Openship and the response is what kept me building.

0. https://nextjs.org

1. https://keystonejs.com

2. https://github.com/openshiporg/openfront

3. https://github.com/openshiporg/openfront-restaurant

4. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32690410

[byzantinegene]

very much seems like a product built by an someone with no product research. The UX makes no sense for e-commerce.

[eloisius]

If you have runway, it’s a good time to start your own thing or join someone who is. Personally, I cannot force myself to wade through slop PRs from careless coworkers. If that’s the job now, I’d rather run a hotdog stand or something.

Luckily, I don’t think things are that dire. I think the companies issuing AI mandates are manufacturing sawdust, and even if it works, it would just enable them to burn through customer goodwill in record time as they make user-hostile decisions free from engineer pushback.

These are going to be a few tough years, but I think the opportunities to start something new are everywhere.

[dfedbeef]

Pretty sure it's going to be a tough couple of decades, not just years.

[eloisius]

Of course I don't know either way. However, I feel like it's going to be different, but maybe not apocalyptic. The market I am building for is photographers, and from what I can gather (and know first hand as a customer) is that there's real discontent with the toolmakers in our ecosystem.

It seems like in the quest for every tech company to become a multi-billion dollar empire, they've lost the plot on making hammers for their customers and have instead turned into some kind of strip mining operation. A totally AI agent-driven company is a MBA wet dream, and I think a fever dream. If Adobe, for example, were to achieve it, I don't think they'd use it to fix the backlog of bugs overnight. I believe they'd just become an even more incoherent zombie, trying to extract rents from creative cloud subscriptions.

In the meantime, photographers still need tools. If you wanna run a software company as a regular small-to-medium-sized business, you may find some customers that are happy to buy a quality hammer. The unicorn startup days might be behind us, but I'd be okay with that.

Now, if AI obviates creatives altogether I don't really know what to say. I'd morn the loss of a world that became so tasteless that AI-generated decorations are good enough, for starters.

[ElProlactin]

But even the market for "photographers" is arguably in secular decline. Smartphones and AI have turned everyone into a photographer. The world is awash in visual content.

[eloisius]

It's true. Magazines sales are dead. Product photography is probably toast (I'm seeing companies test what they can get away with using AI generated images of their food/products right now). Sports? I don't even follow it but I suspect it's all video content now. Funny enough wedding photography seems to be doing fine as far as a commercial segment goes.

But there are segments of the market that were always small, and AI doesn't threaten. Namely, fine-art and long-term documentary. The kind of work that gets shown as exhibition and sold as prints or photobooks. I can't imagine this stuff be supplanted by generative AI, because it has never been about economic efficiency. It's a labor of love for a photographer to work on a project for years at a time because the subject is important to them. And the customers of these works are not likely to accept lower-cost substitutes produced by a AI. The whole thing is too much about taste and thoroughly infused with humanist ethics. When I buy a photobook, I want to know that the artist lived and produced what I'm seeing, not just that it's pretty ink dots on paper.

From a market analysis perspective it's foolish to cater to these tiny and commercially nonviable artists. However, they have enormous esteem and influence within the community, and make part of their living as educators. I believe making tools that they need, and without blood-sucking cloud subscriptions, you are indirectly marketing to all the creatives (usually tending toward commercial) who attend workshops and see what tools they are running the workshop with.

[CodingJeebus]

I don't think it's possible either. DHH pointed out in the most recent episode of Rework that AI removes a lot of the barriers to shipping code, therefore making it possible to build in lots of different directions in ways that was prohibitive to many organizations in the past. But this isn't necessarily a good thing, companies still need to understand what to build in order to ship a cohesive product. AI is great for prototyping and refining use cases in ways that are far superior to static figma designs, etc., but it is not a replacement for taste and execution.

But a slop machine that haphazardly shoots features against the wall to see what sticks still isn't a winning product strategy in 2026. And the problem I see increasingly is that so much energy is being focused on how to deliver with AI internally and externally that is not being expended to advance a company's product. I believe more and more in the idea that for many startups and companies, the actual "customers" are the investors and the product-market fit that companies seek is the product of the company itself, because this is all being driven from the top down, not by customers and users in the market asking for AI features.

[fzeroracer]

> I believe more and more in the idea that for many startups and companies, the actual "customers" are the investors and the product-market fit that companies seek is the product of the company itself

In many respects this reflects the growing K-shaped nature of our economy. Average consumers don't matter because you really just need a small cohort of wealthy individuals to be hyper-invested in your product, 'regular' consumption is therefore just a way to keep things relatively on rails rather than the actual economic driver.

All of these AI-first companies don't actually have any market fit, so what they're doing is selling an imaginary product so that they can get investments and loans. As you said the company is the product.

[w29UiIm2Xz]

The bottleneck wasn't the coding, but previously it had the second order effect of slowing product development decisions enough to improve product cohesion.

[majormajor]

It also created a cargo cult though.

"What can we get rid of for MVP" as a design strategy vs a way to iterate fast, for instance. Cutting things isn't a way to product cohesion, especially if you never go back to do the full-featured version.

Sometimes I wonder how many features or products flopped because the MVP dropped the things that would've actually taken off, and the business "smartly" pivoted away.

There's still a limit to how many new features you could shove in front of your users per month. But what if they were all much more baked out of the gate?

(See also: "data driven" product management as an excuse to not have your own vision for the product. If three competitors build a lot more in the span of six months, but have to depend more on their own skills and instincts vs A/Bing every little detail, maybe more of them will ship more bold and interesting new things.)

[byzantinegene]

the opposite can also be true, feature bloat can destroy products by making it unclear for users what they should expect.

[cuttothechase]

But that's the nature of the beast isnt it? A probabilistic token predictor will all always have some errors from a human perspective, more and more energy, money and resources will always be needed to control and direct towards desired outcomes.