Counterpoint, why do current state of the art generative AI companies, with the ability to use models that the public can't even access, and the ability to burn tokens at cost, still pay for very expensive Saas software?
That's really simple - actually writing the software has never really been the hard part in most SaaS apps. So long as you're moderately disciplined and organised it's easy to build what most SaaS apps are e.g. a CRUD-app-with-a-clever-bit. The clever bit is the initial challenge that sets it apart from the rest, but encoding that in software has never really been that difficult.
Having the ideas necessary to know what to write is where practically all the value lies (caveat: there is value in doing the same as someone else but better, or cheaper.) AI can help with that, but only in so much as telling you the basics or filling in the blanks if you're really stuck. It can't tell you the 'clever bit' because that is by definition new and interesting and doesn't appear in the training data.
What this means is that at some point Anthropic will be able to prompt Opus to clone Jira and never pay an Atlassian bill again. Opus just needs to figure out what Jira is first. It's not there yet.
> What this means is that at some point Anthropic will be able to prompt Opus to clone Jira and never pay an Atlassian bill again. Opus just needs to figure out what Jira is first. It's not there yet.
Bang on, and Jira is the perfect example! Because Jira isn't a bag of features: Jira is a list of features and the way they fit together (well or poorly, depending on your opinion).
That's the second-order product design that it's going to take next-gen coding AI workflows to automate. Mostly because that bit comes from user discovery, political arguments, sales prioritization, product vision, etc. It's a horrendous "art" of multi-variable zero-sum optimization.
When products get it right (early Slack) then it's invisible because "of course they made it do the thing I want to do."
When products get it wrong (MS Teams, Adobe Acrobat, Jira, HR platforms) then it's obvious features weren't composed well.
Expect there's more than one {user discovery} -> {product specification} AI startup out there, working on it in a hierarchical fashion with current AI now.
On top of that, it's one thing to write the code, whereas it's another to actually run that code with maximal reliability and minimal downtime. I'm sure LLMs can churn out Terraform all day long, but can they troubleshoot when something goes wrong (as is often the case)?
I would posit another large factor is "owning" the software comes with the long tail of edge cases, bugs, support, on-call, regulations, etc... that an established SaaS has learned and iterated on for many years with many customers.
For the vast majority of companies they would (and should) rather let the SaaS figure that out and focus on their actual company
AI companies already know what they need. they're paying for it. it would make a great case study for them to make a list of all external software they're using, list the features they use (or make the ai watch them for a week), and then prompt the AI to rewrite those in-house.
This is what people don't get, what's coming up and it'll hit them like a ton of bricks. Software development, after toy examples, was a scale limiting factor for the better part of software development if you had domain expertise. Now, we hear constantly that it doesn't matter since "muh experience" and architecture, choices, tradeoffs etc for which you need seniority to operate LLM efficiently (or at all). This is true, of course. What people don't seem to get that that's what's coming next. Your experience won't mean crap anymore and then the ride starts full blast.
Addendum to counterpoint: why haven't those SotA gen-AI companies become the most productive software companies on earth, and release better and cheaper competitors to all currently popular software?
People always gripe about the poor quality of software staples like Microsoft Office or GitHub or Slack. Why hasn't OpenAI or Anthropic released a superior office suite or code hosting platform or enterprise chat? It would be both a huge cash cow and the best possible advertising that AI-facilitated software development is truly the real deal 10x force multiplier they claim.
If someone invents a special shovel that can magically identify ore deposits 100% of the time, they aren't going to sell it with the rest of the shovelmongers. They're going to keep it to themselves and actually mine gold.
Because it’s not their business to sell a chat app? "Our company is the frontier lab for AI models, oh and btw we also offer SlackClone, sign up for enterprise please". Their job is selling shovels, really good, increasingly more expensive shovels that keep getting better, let others waste their time looking for gold.
But Google sells the productivity apps and also does the exact same things OpenAI does.
If their work on Gemini is this leading world-class stuff, why aren’t Google’s software products not suddenly becoming better?
Was the most recent release of Android demonstrative of a significant uptick in product iteration? Shouldn’t we suddenly be seeing Android pulling far ahead of iOS in an unusually rapid fashion because Apple doesn’t have access to the same quality of shovels?
What about Microsoft Windows 11? Isn’t Microsoft a major OpenAI investor with full access to their latest and greatest?
Why aren’t we seeing release schedules accelerate or feature lists growing at a faster rate?
Supposedly we are selling a lot of shovels here but I don’t see a lot of holes being dug.
Android is a poor example here especially with how more and more features are moved from the OS to Play services. Google is shipping so many features without even an OS update that's how Android has always been. Even for their OS, Pixel feature drops happen every quarter. AOSP is only a base for others to build anyway, have you seen how fast samsung and others are pushing updates and uncountable number of features. It's not comparable to iOS at all.
Not really no. It's pretty much the same pace as before. I wanted to point out Android is not playing catch up to iOS in anyway in features or quality, it's the opposite. Your comment asked why Google isn't catching up to Apple with AI's help. iOS meanwhile has been regressing since 18 and is a mess now on 26.
Yes, to clarify, I’m not making any claim on Android versus Apple and which one is better, who is catching up to whom. Which operating system is ahead or better is essentially irrelevant to the point I’m making.
My main claim revolves around your second sentence: Google is a major primary source of AI research and has access to frontier models before all their customers, especially competitors like Apple who are clearly behind in the AI race and/or not participating in the same way.
In theory, if AI is transformational to developer velocity, Android and all other products under Google’s umbrella should be moving faster than competitors that don’t have early access and preferential wholesale cost AI infrastructure, and they should be clearly iterating faster and better than they did prior to ~2022-2024.
To me, the biggest argument for an AI bubble burst is that companies like Meta and Google won’t actually be able to show their prospective customers that their own workflows have benefitted. Google can’t say “we now ship major [Google Product] features n% faster/better” because there’s no evidence of it. They might make the claim but nobody will believe them.
Major corporations will try the products, start spending $20-200 per engineer per month extra, they’ll see productivity gains of <5% and maybe even see code quality drop, then they’ll decide that the experiment was a bust.
But they are marketing their AI as replacing all software engineers. Their CEO can’t stop saying it. According to them the cost of producing software is now just the cost of tokens to generate it.
They have special knowledge to leverage AI to clone (and even improve) huge revenue businesses with high margin. If their claims about the abilities of LLMs are accurate it would be foolish to just leave that on the table.
It would also prove the power of their LLM product as truly disruptive. It would be amazing marketing!
They care about money, they are making tons of investor money doing what they are doing, there's no incentive to pivot if it would just turn investor money into consumer money.
Their business is making money. If they can build money printing machines, they're not going to refuse to use them because that's "not their business".
Do you really think they would be out donating trillions of dollars to other companies out of the goodness of their hearts, instead of just bankrupting everyone in the software industry if they could?
Huh? What kind of question is that? Who waste the opportunity to win the AI race to become another Jira vendor? Everything has the opportunity cost. Didn’t you already learn that?
Isnt that point kind of the counterpoint to the AI-first narrative.
With standard, human driven operations its true about opportunity costs. What we are told is that AI will replace human, essentially saying that opportunity cost becomes cash only. Then the question of why doesnt AI lab start SaaS fully managed by AI becomes ever more interesting. Maybe because it's not that simple. Hence, it's not that easy in other companies as well to just replace devs, engineers and so on with AI
Waste ? They can become both an AI race winner AND a disruptive Jira vendor. Yet they don't. Why ?
To be a successful Jira vendor will prove their point that software engineers are obsolete now. Why don't they do that already ?
Why hasn't OpenAI or Anthropic released a superior office suite or code hosting platform or enterprise chat?
My guess is two-fold. One, they are specialized in AI. Two, building another anthropic is a big moat and they like to keep it big vs what you could build with it.
Why aren't we in the year of the Linux desktop? It's free and arguably close enough, better, or as good as Windows.
I think in the modern world people would absolutely sell the special shovel, because even if you have a better product that doesn't mean people are going to be using it. You need to have a much better product for a long time for that to happen. And being much better than the competition is hard.
Anthropic appears to have realized before OpenAI that code gen was an important enough market to specialize in.
For now though, building smarter models / general integration tooling is a better us of model companies' capital.
Once/if performance gains plateau, expect you'll see them pivot right quick to in-house software factories for easily cloneable, large TAM product spaces, then spin off those products if they're successful.
100% agreed. When/if that pivot happens will be the sign that gen-AI is truly disrupting the software market in a profound way. "You're using the model wrong/you're not using the latest model" is an oft-repeated argument against AI skeptics. Nobody knows how to use the latest models better than their developers.
their costs are bound to compute anyway, they don't mind huge compensations also - it's not much of a cost saving to re-build, even cheaply, inhouse Slack or whatever?
Why do you have to waste ultra-expensive engineers on it? You have agents. And verifying your product works as it is claimed should absolutely be part of your mission. How can you possibly claim that your models are revolutionising software development if you haven't even used them to revolutionise your own software development in-house? Not only that, it would produce a huge marketing coup that would immediately lead to a flood of enterprise spending if you could demonstrate that your agents actually do what you constantly claim them to do.
PS. If you're claiming that coding an application is ultra-expensive, you are already entering the argument on the side of the comment you're arguing against, which is making a counterpoint to the article, which claims in the first sentence:
> The math is simple: if it costs almost nothing to build an app, it costs almost nothing to clone an app. And if cloning is free, subscription pricing dies.
They did revolutionise software development in-house. Both Codex/Claude Code are 90% agent written these days, and bring in billions of dollars of revenue.
Billions of dollars of revenue on trillions of dollars of investment is not a revolutionary feat. I promise you I could turn trillions into billions too.
Neither of those software are primarily responsible for the revenue, either. The actual models underlying them are, not the trivial CLI chat interface (which, despite being trivial software, still manages to be full of bugs that go unfixed for months). I also don't even think it's true that Codex is primarily agent-written. OpenAI specifically cited using Electron in their recent Codex desktop application for "agent orchestration" to save human developer time on porting it across platforms, which does not sound like a successful exercise in eating their dog food.
If you have tools that allow superior efficiency shouldn't you be hiring every possible just expensive engineer you can get your hands on and put them to produce massive amounts of products to out compete everyone else in the world.
Shouldn't they be in place to replace absolutely every other tech company? That is tens of trillions of valuation in short few years.
> For apps that run locally—no servers, no cloud costs—subscriptions make no sense anymore. The only real cost is development, and that's becoming negligible. If someone charges $10/month for a local PDF editor, someone else will build a clone for $5 one-time. Then someone will make it free.
There are plenty of things to be sad about when it comes to AI. But the loss of this kind of "subscription" app is not one of them, imo.
Good riddance to this hellscape of a market. We now face the dawning of a new slopocalypse era, and its whole new set of problems.
It's just the same community of people who believe they are unable/it is beneath them to acquire skills because of some impending super-automation that will let them do everything great that they have envisioned but have previously been stifled by the aforementioned lack of skills moving from one hype-bubble to the next.
Everyone who has built software knows that the hardest parts involve making complex, tricky decisions with tradeoffs. Let’s say you make a grocery list app. Now you have to make decisions about all the different ways to specify quantity. Units, weight, dollars, bunches… oh, and fractional vs. decimal weight, etc…
The claim is that now every random person now will build their own app and have to make those hard decisions instead of paying $5 a month for someone else to do that work. Comparative advantage doesn’t just apply to the cost of writing code, but also the effort of making product decisions.
Edit: I don’t mean that a grocery app should cost $5/month, the grocery app was a toy example and the $5/month refers to an example of a separate app you’d pay for with much more value.
This thread hits very close to home for me. I'm engineering the frontend for a grocery list app as a capstone project right now and I'm handling a lot of the product and feature decisions, and the discussion about "just prompt Claude to build it" versus the reality of those decisions is something my team deals with constantly.
The example of reverse-engineering your grocery store's API and building a custom solution is awesome, and it's exactly the kind of thing that's now possible. But what I've found is that even with AI assistance, there are so many interconnected decisions that make this more than a one-shot prompt project.
I pushed for us to build a mobile app specifically to take advantage of portability (use it at home for planning, at the store for shopping) and the camera (image recognition with OpenAI and scanning barcodes with expo-camera). That sounds simple, but it cascades into hundreds of UX decisions about offline-first architecture, gesture patterns, camera permissions, and more.
The units and quantities problem mentioned in this thread is just the tip of the iceberg. I'm trying to figure out a data model that mirrors how people naturally think about groceries: how they categorize items, how they plan meals versus staples versus impulse buys, how they track what's running low. Modeling those mental models is genuinely hard.
What helps is that I worked as an ecommerce shopper at Whole Foods, and I learned that stores are meticulously organized with numbered bays and predetermined routes optimized for efficiency. Translating that knowledge into a system that can intelligently sort a shopping list based on store layout (which varies by location!) and typical shopping patterns is genuinely complex.
One of my teammates put it well: this is a simple idea, but it requires a level of care, expertise, and experience to get it right. AI's incredibly helpful for implementing solutions once we've made these decisions, but the decisions themselves require domain knowledge, user research, and taste. That's the part that's hard to automate, and it's what makes this a real engineering project rather than a weekend Claude experiment.
Some things are just not suited to an app. It's still easier to jot down a shopping list on a piece of paper than to use an app and a janky mobile phone keyboard. And bonus, nobody gets to sell your shopping preferences or blast you with ads as you're trying to use it!
I spent years trying to find the PERFECT pantry tracking, auto shopping list generating, auto "what can I make tonight with what I have", auto meal preping app. The idea seemed so simple in mind back then. Let me input everything I have, then as I pull ingredients out of the fridge I just "decrease eggs by 3, decrease butter by 1tbsp, decrease bacon by 2 slices" then over time, it will just build my shopping list for me etc. I even built a requirement list and spent a year implementing my own thing.
Given the number of apps put there, from dozens of OSS hobbyist apps to industrial resturant inventory management ones, I wan't alone in thinking this is a solved problem and someone should just have the perfect interface for it. Between auto-unit converting apps, natural language processing apps, @cooklang, a million ideas about tracking pantries and ingredients and their categories, frequency of use charts, etc..
Then one time I went on a trip with a friend to his home town where we stayed at his parents house. His 78 year old mother had a 2 notepads attached to the fridge with a pencil on a string. As she worked in the kitchen, between washing hands she would just jot down random notes, cross others, doddles some on one notepad, and the other she would just add meal plans as she went along. Then when we were going to market she just ripped the page off.
Sounds so fucking simple and easy and I felt so stupid for the amount of effort I put trying to figure out the right app, the right device to mount on my fridge, how to connect power to it. How to make it not always on to blind me at night, but also so I don't have to keep fiddling with it to unlock it. how to use it with wet fingers, how to keep translating units and "catch up" when I miss updating it for a couple of meals, how to hide ingredients I don't care about and highlight ones I do, how to rearrange the interface. It seriously gave me a pause at how dumb I was that the solution is much much simpler and I pigeon holed my thinking on a tech solution for some reason.
Can't sell people notepads though. There is no margin or lock-in in that stuff.
I do hear what you're saying, and I've wrestled with "not everything should / can be an app". That being said, I'm still trying to solve food (for myself) with computers, haha.
Right now, that looks like trying to create a nutritionally-optimal "dog food for humans", using combinatorial optimization solvers. I think I'm going to write something up as a post when it becomes a bit more feature-complete.
It's living at chow.seanjohnsen.com if you're curious! Would love feedback from someone who has thought along these lines.
A grocery list app is the perfect example of the kind of thing that AI will make obsolete. Why would I pay $5/month for a list app when I can pay Claude $0.30 one time to make it for me?
I in fact did just that. I used Claude to reverse engineer my grocery store's API and build a grocery list app that automatically pulls in the aisle information for each item and sorts it by how I typically walk through the store. It's the kind of thing that would be incredibly difficult to scale but works just fine when you only have one user. No SaaS grocery app can hope to compete with me being able to tailor my own shopping list app to my exact preferences.
Your grocery store has a free API you can use? Even if that is the case, that will then soon change. If app building becomes "free" then the cost will shift over to the data access.
That is exactly the type of awesome app that can now be built. I edited my comment to clarify that the grocery app and $5/month app are separate examples, but I think your example shows that someone with coding knowledge can build something extremely useful for n=1 users which I fully support.
I just don’t think most people will end up doing that just like how most people don’t 3D print their own desk drawer organizers even when Gridfinity does all the work for you. Automation doesn’t fully replace the volition to build a thing and make tricky decisions that are familiar to us software engineers but not others.
Exactly. I think only software developers believe AI is going to kill app subscriptions, because they're the ones who can actually wrangle the output into something maintainable.
For anyone without dev or product experience, getting beyond a basic feature set and keeping it running reliably (or roll it out to > 1 user) is still a massive challenge.
Yes, that’s a possibility! And for app types that have a limited ceiling of how much value they can provide, that will definitely be a thing as an AI app can saturate all of that value.
But for apps that have a lot of ceiling, people will still gravitate to apps that have had more care and attention than someone vibe coding it once and throwing it on the store, just like how people choose those well-built and maintained apps today over using their built-in Reminders app.
I guess for the author's limited worldview - "apps" are only available through the app stores.
could be an unfortunate thing of the author growing up in an era of gated ecosystems.
however much of the software out there - is via web - and some desktop - some internal use - some external - some shit without ui - some billed yearly, some billed by subscriptions
but I guess tell us how AI is gonna kill subscriptions
Actually I've been making several webapps with AI lately, for things I've always wished for and can now selfhost.
At one point I had an idea I brought to AI, got ready to code it, then said "wait, someone has to have done this before me", sure enough, found it, written with warp!
So I can't say it'll kill all app subscriptions, but AI is definitely enabling people to finally make reality out of that idea they've had rattling around their heads but never took the time to realise.
As someone here with limited coding experience. I have built several custom applications that are too unique to be made by anyone. Now I can make several simple applications that do exactly what I need and want. It’s cut out hours of administrative work stuff I had to do. Do I share nope I gatekeep it at work. If only IT built these systems and databases to be easily used by us users.
The salient point is it is becoming easier and easier for end-users to create apps for their use cases, rather than having to rely on a developer, or packaged apps.
The implicit point here is that devtools-type standardization subscriptions are about to get juiced.
Think Vercel, Supabase, et al. Because most of the time agents prefer glueing together managed services than building from scratch, unless they're told otherwise.
And if I'm someone building a custom in-house solution to replace a SaaS subscription product, I'm going to pay lower managed costs without blinking.
Idk I was using Claude code this weekend to do some experimenting with supabase. Claude code had no issue integrating supabase into my application and even do the schema and rls setup. I think supabase is safe because it’s managed, has plenty of features, and the agents know it. That may be the key to saas survival, do the agents know about your service and how to integrate it into their work? …man that sounds scary just replace “agents” with “software devs” in my last sentence. It’s a crazy world.
I can come up with a few ideas that could work, but lately I have opted not to give my ideas out for free. I do think we are over estimating actual apps complexity given that Apple is strict about what goes into their app store. As for websites the complexity of hosting a vibe coded app is often overlooked.
That all said, I could see some killer features coming to AI companies if they really want to make a dent.
I think it depends on what percentage of apps need a website. Most users use apps on their devices, for me, I don't want to open another website when I need an App if it's avoidable.
This whole thing of "AI makes it possible for everyone to do it" has led to shit books on Amazon, shit videos on YT, and now we're looking at shit apps on the app store.
As many have said, making stuff isn't the hard part. Making good stuff is the hard part.
Competition is absolutely going to crush the concept of mooching off a simple app costing $6/week or $10/month, but it doesn't matter where that competition comes from the problem is a guitar tuner shouldn't cost $100/year, it was always artificially successful derived from preventing users any other way to get apps. If AI doesn't kill this it will be 3rd party marketplaces or open source app distribution that does it.
I' not sure for the reason that for every one of the successful subscription apps there were dozens of free or nearly free competitors. The app stores have been awash with wannabe clones from the start.
Yeah but virtually all customer acquisition comes from either being featured or paying for ads both of which favour subscription apps over free/nearly-free.
It never made sense, it was just possible to get away with it because there's often been no alternative for many people.
Good riddance to software subscriptions.
I hope proprietary software goes the same way entirely. If it's trivial to build an open source competitor, why pay for software can't modify (also trivially).
Counter argument ... at what point is software still profitable to be sold?
I am running my Office 2007 still, and that thing is now almost 20 years old. That was a one time sale, with no other revenue for Microsoft.
I am not condoning subscriptions but one time selling software only works good, if your a small team with low overhead. The more you sell, the more support becomes a issue. And normal customers do not pay for support.
Making software now has become easier with LLMs but the same problem keeps existing in regards to support. Sure, you can outsource this to LLMs but lets just say that is problematic (being kind).
So unless you plan on making software that is not heavily supported/updated, and keep a low single/team cost...
If you sold a program for a one time fee of ... $39.
What if somebody now sells the same for $29 with LLMs. And the next guy in China does it even cheaper because his overhead is even smaller. Eventually you get into abandonware where software is made to just eat sales from the bigger guy and that is it.
Unless you focus on companies, and they have way less issue paying for subscriptions (if it includes support). You see the issue. People kind of overlook the cost of actually running a self employed job or a company (this is a MAJOR cost the moment you need to hire somebody).
So no, i do not see subscriptions going away because companies will pay for it. And on the normal consumer level, paid support as the solution?
I also buy the argument that a lot of time people are actually paying for cloud storage. While I'd love to see a generic protocol for cloud or self-hosted storage that every app can sync to, I expect we'll continue to see subscription software persist by locking down and gatekeeping cloud storage and sync, too.
But really I would be happy for that to go away.
I don't use much software that's sold in any way[0], and I'd prefer it to be none. The ideal situation is for it to always be better to collaborate on open source software than to build in private and keep it to yourself.
[0] I do donate to projects I like and use, though
>The ideal situation is for it to always be better to collaborate on open source software than to build in private and keep it to yourself.
This works for some software (developer tools is the prime example) but not so much for other things. Who is going to maintain the MTD software I used for my VAT returns without recompense. Who is going to update the PAYE payroll software I relied on.
Even with developer tools I feel we will lose something without companies like JetBrains. There would be no Kotlin without people paying for their software.
That's before you think about huge corporations leeching off of our free work or the AI companies vacuuming up open source only to regurgitate it for $200 a month.
Developers should consider that most people value things by how much they pay and if they aren't paying anything then you and your work can't have much value.
> Developers should consider that most people value things by how much they pay and if they aren't paying anything then you and your work can't have much value.
Most people in most situations pay as little as they can get away with not as much as they value the product or service.
The only time this is arguably somewhat untrue is when the point of having the thing is to signal wealth, but even someone buying e.g. a Rolex wants to do so as cheaply as possible, so it's only really true when they're directly spending the money in front of people (think bar, restaurant, nightclub, etc.)
I agree that right now it's mostly developer tools that are doing best in terms of open source. But browsers, operating systems, 3D modelling software, image/photo editing, and many others are not so far behind either.
My assertion/belief[0], though, is that the direction of travel is for open source to become dominant in more and more classes of software, especially as AI reduces the cost of contribution and collaboration, and disincentivises closed, proprietary software.
[0] Based on what I and others around me have been able to do with AI already and how fast it is moving.
Agreed, the abundance of many apps and the fact that subscriptions and paid apps are going to zero means anyone can make an app for themselves or use an open source one.
>Did it ever make sense? I always scoffed at the idea of paying a subscription to use a text editor or paint tool.
Whether it made sense for you is mostly irrelevant. The question is whether it worked for the developer. You can read endless complaints about Adobe's subscription model but the profits kept rolling in.
Subscription is not about app ownership, but mostly running the infra. AI is going to make basically everything even more expensive and subscription based.
Yeah. There's a power law distribution in successful apps. The valuable ones wrap content, networks, products your enterprise is subscribed to, or at least rank ahead of similar themed games or an abundance of free with ads clones in an App Store as the "everybody uses this, it just works and you can share with them too" solution.
Sucks for the todo-list-for-x and pretty basic game app creators to have even more competition, but they weren't making bank from subscriptions anyway
I suspect there's a bit of a chance to learn from history here. It was predicted that radiologists would get put out of the job by AI tools. But this didn't happen, largely because trust and liability matter just as much as the service itself.
This isn't a counterargument to the idea that AI is going to kill a lot of app subscriptions, but it tells us about what kinds of apps will get killed, and what apps will have staying power. Ironically, the flood of cheap, low quality AI generated apps might make it harder for cheap apps to overtake bigger players, because overall trust in the ecosystem will go down.
The areas where errors are tolerated with human / "classical algo" fallback is the best field to disrupt with AI. Call center jobs. Recommendations. Search, Curation. Wherever the current process is already stochastic and has a human or rule-based correction loop, AI just needs to be cheaper and roughly as accurate to win.
It's early days yet. You'd have to be crazy to go into radiology, if you were just starting out as a freshly-minted MD. And yes, this is going to be a problem, possibly a big one.
People were saying that a decade ago, if not more, with machine learning outperforming radiologists. Today we don't have enough radiologists. What has changed since those days that one can again say that so confidently?
The difference is that the models now work. I don't know if you've noticed, but a lot has happened since "a decade ago."
Some of the recent studies showing otherwise are literal junk science. They used flawed methodologies, such as blindly feeding the data to the models without access to medical histories that the human doctors would have benefited from (which favored the human radiologists substantially) and leaving labels on the training data (which favored the models.) When studies are conducted under more rigorous standards, the humans don't tend to win, and unlike the models the humans will not get better.
Video game AI from 20 years ago was already good enough to perform ATC at an algorithmic level. It's not a difficult problem, if approached as a system, because there are no surprises left in the field. Every situation that will ever need to be handled by ATC has either been encountered and understood by now, or can reasonably be anticipated and modeled, making it a good candidate for automation.
The problem -- like self-driving cars that generally outperform humans but aren't allowed on the roads because occasionally they still screw up -- is primarily political, not technical. A rational point of view wouldn't demand perfect performances from machines that were never achieved by humans in the first place. Eventually lawmakers and regulators will get that through their heads, and we'll all be better off for it... but the transition will be a rough one.
Not for technical reasons, but because it enables the masses to flood the market with low-quality software. Eventually people just won't bother because there's too much junk to wade through (and no reliable method of curation/validation).
Definitely this, my hobby is already filled with a ton of sloppy vibe coded apps that all do the same thing very badly with awful UI/UX. They all ask for a monthly subscription and, surprise, nobody uses them.
Meanwhile the hand crafted app that does the same thing gets put in the same bucket as the AI slop ones and is ignored.
AI won’t kill subscriptions but it will drive prices down. Viable competitors will emerge and incumbency will become a less viable long term play.
Non-experts will build progressively more interesting things as model capability goes up - but experts will always be able to produce yet more complex things than that.
So user expectations will keep rising.
The cost of software development will go down for software at and below some level of complexity, but up for anything above that level. The level where that tips will keep changing, just as it always has. To understand this, consider that tipping point across today’s and yesterday’s “hand-typed software”: it has been moving the whole time, thanks to frameworks and libraries and languages improving.
The world of software will remain much as it is today - a mix of free and non-free stuff. But on average and in the large it’ll be of way higher quality, and bring corresponding improvements in your quality of life.
I think that even if everything can be copied, some platforms are still hard to copy, and some have greater barriers that are legal compliance, and others needs to be able to scale to be viable. Even if apps can be copied, the underlying architectural decisions are usually not so visible as the interface, and the developer should have a good knowledge of building architectures to add value to the existing apps.
My guess is that copying is not enough, but adding value or saving costs is.
I’ve been talking about this a lot with founder/coder types in my circle of friends with a wide variety of opinions.
My theory as an old guy is that the standards will just go up.
There’s a current business model where you can make a basic but useful tool that solves a specific business problem and make money. That’s going to end.
We’ve seen this before. A good example would be when the mobile app stores launched and you could get traction with just about anything. And then you couldn’t.
> There’s a current business model where you can make a basic but useful tool that solves a specific business problem and make money. That’s going to end.
I don't know... Because the tool that solves a specific business problem usually requires tons of business expertise. And when company buy this tool, they mainly do it for the expertise diluted in it.
If they didn't already made their own in-house implementation, it's because they don't want to invest in maintaining the tool that requires expertise outside of their actual business.
Meanwhile, the company building the tool can invest in keeping this expertise because it's financed by the multiple companies paying for the tool.
That's what I think will happen. Not just standards but taste and design as well. I think there's almost even more demand for good designers now than ever before.
Why? VERY good design signals this is tasteful and quality. Not an AI-slop-vibe-mess.
> Why? VERY good design signals this is tasteful and quality. Not an AI-slop-vibe-mess.
I'm not too sure about this. Very good design, at least in terms of marketing materials such as screenshots, may be end up signalling the use of AI in the coding as well. I know if an app has obviously-AI-generated photos in the screenshots I would be disinclined even to try it.
I hadn't heard the app store submission stats. Does this answer Mike Judge's question of where the shovelware is [0,1]? Did we just need to wait a few months?
That essay was written weeks before Opus 4.5 was released which was an inflection point for the ability of Claude code and specifically how well it would work with less guidance.
People will still pay for convenience or functionality.
If there is a feature that cannot be done on-device, and that on-Internet feature can be effectively moated and duplication-resisted, then if it’s a feature that people think they need they will absolutely open their wallets to pay for.
The trick is finding that feature or attribute that cannot be done on-device, and then moating it against AI duplication. Do that, make it appear indispensable in the minds of people, and they will absolutely pay for it.
Yes but they will pay less because there will 50 competitors who provide similar enough software for fraction of prices. Having a moar that’s not replicable for cheaper is rare
I wonder if this will wind up being true. Yes it’s cheaper to produce an app but most normies I know don’t really want to produce an app. No instead they want to consume a curated app. If anything we’ve moved the value proposition from “it exists” to “it exists and is good, especially compared to the competition.”
App creators will be competing and copying each other. The software that can support change will probably win in the market. Probably…?
What the OP says someone else will do it cheaper not the normies will do themselves. We already have tons of free and cheap software for the sake of it without making any commercial sense, now we will have way more it.
I believe we are having this discussion from a purely technical perspective and not from a business one. Let's take slack for example. Assuming a company can perfectly clone it, why would they? Yes they would skip paying for it, but they would have to maintain it, starting from its infrastructure all they way up to its UI. Will they think of new features? Will they follow industry developments in sound / streaming technology? Will they keep integrating other tools into it? I am sure they would rather pay to have somebody else do it for them, someone like slack itself.
Also, assuming a company has the capital to burn through enough tokens to create something so big and complex, why spend it on an internal tool? Shouldn't they be spinning slack-sized apps to expand their existing market share or try to disrupt new markets?
> it costs almost nothing to build an app, it costs almost nothing to clone an app.
For the types of apps that AI can clone on its own, this has always been true. It's the eternal bookstore example, recipe collection, or my-dvd-collection app. The type of apps that Basic and Visual Basic were designed for.
If there was value in selling subscriptions to an app like this, it was probably coincidental.
I don't agree with the premise that we pay a subscription because there is no better and cheaper alternative. We pay Slack subscriptions but we could get IRC for free. We pay Google Drive subscription but we could get rsync for free.
The reason we pay a subscription is because the company that built the software knows our business, knows how to get in touch with the decision maker, and knows how to market their product as something desirable. The actual software has little influence in that decision.
On the contrary, I think the price of SaaS subscriptions will go up as a result of AI. Because the only customers who will switch to a cheaper (or home made) alternative are the ones for whom the software is a commodity. These customers used to form the long tail of subscriptions, usually on the lower tier. When the entry pricer disappears, and the software editor has to generate a high return for their investors, the only way to keep profitability is to increase the price for the other tiers.
I just did this at work, I was working with Postman testing an API and wanted it work in a slightly different way and be able to do some bulk testing, saving responses, all slightly different then how Postman worked. I clone just the features I wanted in about 15 minutes and now have my own API test tool that works exactly how I want. It is not something I would ever release or need to share, just a local tool for me to use. If your software doesn't provide a service, like sync, storage, availability, if it is just local, it'll be a tough market.
This also got me thinking about open source might be dying. For this tool, there is no reason for me to open source it, anyone can create the same thing in minutes. I didn't add anything, the only maybe interesting part would be to share the prompt, but then someone else can create their own prompt to have their tool do what they want.
I agree that software without a service model faces a tough market. Sometimes, users just want software that works indefinitely on their phones without subscriptions or ads. That’s why many people are big fans of one-time purchase apps. I’m one of them; I prefer local apps because I know the software won't deteriorate over time.
Open source should acquire greater, multiplied value once the new scaffolding is put into place. The open source community is still using the past approach, which is going to be largely washed away.
More people with more agents freely contributing more to even more concentrated and scaled-up projects.
Those agents will get more potent. The projects can get more ambitious.
One user with N Claude usage. 100 users with 100x the Claude usage. Who can build the superior product? If you put the right structure on it, the 100x wins by a drastic margin. Those 100x Claudes benefit in combination courtesy of the open source effect, their potential additive value is greatly enhanced.
The 1x outcome will end up being relegated to triviality (the one page homepage as website). The bar is about to be raised really, really, really high in software if you want to be relevant. This is merely a very short transition period.
>something I would ever release or need to share, just a local tool for me to use.
>This also got me thinking about open source might be dying.
Just because you can generate a wrapper app for a very specific use-case doesn't mean open source is dead or dying. As if open source was all just about people sharing their crappy specific use-case apps.
And software isn't getting weird. A part of the software development life cycle is being automated.
Automation of easy templated tasks will cause a huge disruption. Production of software used to be a skilled job, but now is automated to a large degree. This has huge impacts to the profession as a whole. Already, enrollment to the UC CS program is declining.
From a developer's perspective, it seems like we're at a point where we're increasingly concerned about how to make a living and how to pursue a career.
What if "Stallman was right" and this means users will actually pay people to make software for them, even if it's "open source"? (TFA doesn't mention open source but it might as well be if cloning is cheap)
Longer term this can happen but currently... I'm sure that even people who are not software people and do this for them alone, if they do this, will jump of a bridge after a few months when yet somehow something else (the vacation pics before 2014) just disappeared and AI comes with 'I found the bug! The migration blabhalbha. All your data gone. Question, Do you have a backup?' etc. And this potentially every change. Software devs deal with that all the time, but this is not going to work yet otherwise. We get tremendous value out of it for our company but we didn't drop our extreme rigid development process for some vibe coding; we vibe code but with a lot of guardrails which we built up over decades to deal with outsourcing companies (many of them far worse than any modern LLM tool) for our clients.
One of our top earners always was(is still) simple; companies to hire/fire cheap cans of devs, but cans of devs are crap quality (generally) so we help companies set up, based on their stack, guardrails preventing full out bloodshed. We always got a lot of flack from 'modern devs' because we take away the freedom; seems it was a good thing; llms + freedom is misery. Well, I guess it's also performance art of sorts.
I think the article has some truth but the author also ignores something important. Yes, subscription costs are going down. But there's a big difference between consumer and enterprise. Everyone needs to build fast now. A company cannot get distracted by building capabilities in-house that are not core to their product. This was true yesterday and will be true tomorrow. That means they will keep paying for quality solutions and not settle for sub-par solutions just because someone made them for free (there was always an open source solution available long before AI entered the scene). I may argue that not settling is even more important now that moving fast is key.
For a company, paying $10K a year for a quality service, that's a no-brainer. Most companies spend that money on alcohol in company onsites. However, if you're charging really high prices (the Datadogs of the world), then you're going to face tougher competition from cheaper alternatives that might be as good as you, and when companies need to cut costs, which they often do, you'll be in trouble.
I think what it means to many software companies is that prices will significantly go down on average but the median might not see significant decrease. Companies will be smaller and more lean, hiring less people in general (not just engineers!). There will be more companies out there, so hopefully it will even out.
Last thing is that every product will have too many options to choose from. This has been the reality actually for a long time and going to get much worse. How you market and brand your product and acquire customers will become more difficult than ever.
"The math is simple: if it costs almost nothing to build an app, it costs almost nothing to clone an app. And if cloning is free, subscription pricing dies. We're already seeing this play out in the numbers. Apple's App Store got 557K new submissions in 2025, up 24% from 2024 (source: Appfigures). That's not because people suddenly got more creative. It's because building an app went from a $50K project to a weekend with Claude."
No. It's because people got more creative. There are tens of thousands of us who are absolutely on fire creating new products, better versions of old products, new product categories etc. Many of us are burnt out OG programmers who have rediscovered our love for programming. Now we can create without the drudgery.
You're about to see the most tech innovation our species has ever experienced. Hold on to your seat.
Both are true. You’ll see innovation and you’ll see the cost of these very abundant simple apps go to zero. There’s no way around it. Supply and demand. Everyone can make apps, but there isn’t an obvious reason why people would be buying more apps. More apps made + same apps bought = cheaper apps.
This matches what I'm seeing. The AI tooling didn't make building cheaper — it made building fun again. The gap between idea and working prototype collapsed, and that's bringing a lot of experienced builders back off the sidelines.
> No. It's because people got more creative. There are tens of thousands of us who are absolutely on fire creating new products, better versions of old products, new product categories etc.
Nitpicking, but I would argue that people have always been creative, it's a function of our brains. With the ubiquity of camera, videos now show that even birds and animals have levels of creativity. Biological/physical/physics/societal restrictions prevent them from taking it to the next level. Look at what ancient peoples managed to achieve without the benefit of modern tools and techniques; hard to argue people haven't always been creative.
What has changed is the ability to implement our ideas and harness our creativity - that has become significantly simpler in the age of AI.
Perhaps the discrepancy between the OP's framing of what's happening (negative impact to developers because app cost has gone to zero) and your positive perspective (hey, look at all these creative ideas we are now implementing) is a matter of perspective: you're both describing the same phenomenon, just different angles.
I wonder if this was the true message of the Claude C compiler - not that Claude can clone a compiler, but that Anthropic has built a harness, which it can use to observe the behavior and outputs of an existing program (GCC) - it can recreate it with a good enough (at least functioning) replica.
Solo founder running 56 microservices and 69 autonomous agents in production. AI collapsed the build cost by 40-60x, but every architecture decision, security boundary, and ops choice still required experience. The article gets the direction right but the conclusion wrong — subscriptions don't die, per-seat pricing does. When agents are doing the work instead of humans clicking dashboards, you price
Simple takes are never correct. Just like the radiologists example has been proven wrong.
This place is the worst at this too. I get you guys are very involved in writing code that is central to the existence of a software product - but you are not a product designer nor manager. Meaning you dont get people and how they view their choice set and more importantly how they make decisions.
For if you did.. you'd all be shipping your own products and highly successful. But most of you are not shipping your own products with large success behind it. So quit the crap.
I have no idea where this theory that SaaS is dead because vibe coding came from.
My best bet is that some NYC traders take on agents was to post the same bullish take a million times in order to drive tech stocks (which make up the most of the market cap), and buy them for low.
I don’t want to speculate who is behind that. Clearly some SaaS shops are way overpriced but this is in no way the end of the business modell. Some contrarian will find the right timing to counter play and become more wealthy…
> If someone charges $10/month for a local PDF editor, someone else will build a clone for $5 one-time. Then someone will make it free.
There are free PDF editors, but that hasn't changed the fact people pay for them. I don't think this is going to work out like the article thinks it is, unless AI is really easy to use, and does a very good job, but there's always going to be that last 5% of quality that people will want to pay for.
Free sites steal your data. Besides people don't care about the tool, they care about the result. People don't want a faster horse. I strongly believe that this will democratize "doing things" with computers where the tool doesn't matter anymore.
Same goes for Docusign - many competitors exist but the reason Docusign is still popular is because they own the verb and "trust" of the general population.
This is absolute nonsense. The app stores are already saturated with tons of free apps that no one uses. Sure the numbers are up—10x of infinity is still infinity—and the reason Apple doesn't care is because this is just the natural end game of their strategy to commoditize their complement.
When it comes to software subscriptions, the bar is just that much higher. Not only do you have to pass the threshold for someone to even adopt another app/website/brand, but now you have to provide enough utility to pay for it. Claude spitting out code for a good-enough clone of an app doesn't come anywhere near the threshold. An agent that can write the code, buy a domain, provision and maintain the database, and submit the app to the app store gets closer, but now it's not looking so cheap anymore, moreso in terms of your time commitment as defacto product manager than actual tokens and hosting costs.
The actual disruption of SaaS apps will come from agents that are capable of solving problems autonomously in a different way such that you don't even need the SaaS. I'm sure we'll get there in time, but not without a lot of data integrity and security issues, and rogue agent fuckups along the way.
Building a UI is fairly simple, all things considered. Building a full-scale system? Much harder. Deploying it so it can be multi-user? Maintaining it? These are things that separate toys from products.
It's software eating everything that it can as capabilities and reach are added. This has been going on since the earliest software programs launched.
It's identical to Craigslist hollowing out offline classified ads. Classified ads used to be a hyper lucrative market for newspapers (both local and national). That market imploded from ~$17 billion ($32b+ adjusted) in 2000 to $1-$2 billion last year. Once it could, it did.
AI should enable software to touch more things more cheaply (more efficiently in many cases). As it can, it will. Expect a lot more wipe outs.
The premise here seems to be, that the code is where the value is created. That’s maybe true for some apps but not every one. Apps can facilitate interactions (eg Training Peaks), store data long term (eg MyFitnessPal) or act as a part of a complex network of complementary goods (eg Garmin Connect). The last part is especially important: the ability to create something does not necessarily mean the ability to gain value from it.
Oh, thank god, it had been a week since we last saw a post about AI killing something. It’s subscriptions this time, all users will be vibe coding apps on their spare time.
The article's right that build costs are collapsing, but that was rarely the hard part. The cost of a real product is architecture decisions, security, data modeling, ops — stuff that doesn't disappear because Claude wrote your CRUD layer.
What I think actually changes is the packaging. Per-seat subscriptions assumed humans in dashboards. That's the part on borrowed time. The workflow logic underneath still has value — it just gets consumed differently as agents start doing the clicking.
> The math is simple: if it costs almost nothing to build an app, it costs almost nothing to clone an app. And if cloning is free, subscription pricing dies
Yes and no.
I have created 15 small apps that solves all kinds of things for me. However, at the department I work full of non-technical people, most of them don’t even know lovable exists.
And for the one that does know lovable exists, they tend to build stuff with some botched backend and you’ll get to scaling issues, security issues and who knows what else
> This is the same dynamic that kept IBM dominant for decades
IBM still sells mainframes but is no longer a growth darling.
> Markets are right to reassess multiples. But reassessing multiples is very different from pricing in extinction
What you are missing is that the SaaS companies were extremely overpriced. For instance, crm after all the carnage is still priced at 25 times earnings which is historically high for anything that is not a growth company. The perception was that these companies would print money year after year selling software trinkets on their platforms and as such were placed in the growth category. Now, it is plainly obvious that these software trinkets can be produced easily by anyone using AI. Their pricing-power has dramatically declined. Hence the re-rating. None of this contradicts the thesis in your ai-assisted article that these businesses have moats just like IBM and its mainframes. These businesses are now in a vicious reflexive narrative loop where the narrative will impact the real-world which will further fuel the narrative.
By using an external service, people outsource problems. Using agentic coding to „clone“ a service by naively specifying the features (not the implementation) will insource the problem. If the problem is static, separated, well understood and used internally only, it may be okay to do so. In other circumstances I highly doubt it. SaaS markt will come back stronger once people suffered enough pain in doing „the app myself“.
> Apps that need servers (sync, AI features, storage) will still have subscriptions
This makes me excited about what we will see in the self hosted space. Cause now many can both set up say a S3 backend entirely on their own and write/vibe the code that users it.
Now I just need to figure out the iPhone app ecosystem haha (and how to implement mTLS on it)
I think AI is going to kill my sanity. But mostly, because the websites are so bad. It's just a chat interface, but apparently nobody knows how to write those anymore. They use 1GB of memory per instance, slow to load, UI constantly crashes. Then Gemini loses all context when you stop and edit a reply. Then the bots themselves with their hallucination, their gaslighting, their covering up of mistakes, covering up that they can't read a simple PDF. Not following simple instructions.
It's like these companies are trying to get us hooked, then try to make us explode in frustration because it doesn't actually quite work. Not because the AI is bad, but because the interface (30-old-tech, a chat ui) is just broken.
After the dot.com, there was the O-pocalypse that terrified me as a recent grad.
- Open source
- Outsourcing
- Offshoring
It was driving the labour cost of an engineer to zero I felt as a young man.
Then time passed, and I learnt that engineers aren't paid to code. Engineers are paid to solve problems for a business.
If you recall, the dot.com bust and 9/11 crashed finances for a few years. When the money printing gun went whir because "Deficits don't matter" Washington, then engineers were in demand again.
Right now we are in a weird situation where money is being printed and it is also tight. Most of it is going to the hardware and infrastructure layer, like the fiber optic bubble in the dot.com. Software will have its time in the sun again.
Take a look at the history of the power loom which automated weaving in the 19th century. The number of handloom weavers dropped two orders of magnitude after the power loom.
What happened last time is exactly what will never happen again because those were all specific one off, path dependent, moments in time.
I think what you are missing is that it might not be possible to stay in business if you can't use AI to solve problems.
Before the dot com bust, I was paid in college to file papers in file cabinets all day at an office. Ten years on from that, the paper was gone, the file cabinets were gone, obviously the paper filer job was gone and even that business that employed me as a paper filer was gone because they were a dinosaur who couldn't leverage technology well and were put out of business by competitors who could.
There is huge denial on this board that everything is going to be fine hand coding on the legacy systems of dinosaur companies. Seems more likely that if the company has so much technical systems debt that models aren't useful, those companies are not going to be competitive in their area of business.
Counterpoint: why even use LLMs to create apps when the prompting session is the one universal app which can directly solve any problem a specialized app would solve (yes, it's all extremely silly, but so is the article).
I daresay we're going to see a burgeoning situations where the software (code) is open-sourced under a permissive or copyleft license, while the associated data, content, or assets (e.g., datasets, models, or databases) are handled under separate, often more restrictive licenses.
I’ve been running NextCloud with MinIO storage for several years now. If that didn’t kill subscriptions, I highly doubt whatever very brittle, low quality knock offs an LLM would produce will.
The trick with this wave of fast apps will be getting others to use the things that are built. Sure you can build something for yourself quickly enough, but you'll likely need the rest of your team onboard, which comes with a slew of other problems and complexities.
So how is chatgpt going to get me free delivery on Amazon? Not to say, show me Netflix shows, or even more circular: let me chat with chatgpt for free?
Those 3 are my top-of-the-head current app subscriptions I pay for.
There's a whole class of SAAS that's relatively well protected and that is everything that has to do with proprietry, hard to get data. For example a big cyber company like CrowdStrike could (and probably does) decare that its impossible to clone its cyber solution because their solutions and algorithms were trained on and improved on tons of clients data.
So there's that - the data moat.
Other than that I suppose everything that's a pain in the butt to duplicate - lots of regulation, tax codes etc etc. Think Shopify for instance, it's not just cloning the UI and some CRUD you need to clone a whole shitload of boring backend work that deals with this shit - and then keep a bunch of agents to constanty supervise regulation and update the software (And perhaps have a few humans overseeing the whole process); is it worth having the agents + few humans in the loop over paying for Shopify ? Currently - I doubt it. When agent costs plummet to almost zero and you dont need any humans in the loop - yes, probably worth it. We're not there yet.
Where's the analogy breaks down is that AI isn't producing verbatim copies. There's no expectation that dropbox should be protected from clones, for instance.
I've got the PDF specification on my desk at the moment. 1200 pages of vague details on the format. I don't know why you expect to get a product that works with that for nothing.
Honestly, AI is just going to accelerate app subscriptions. Since it costs nothing to build now, you can just make your own SaaS and charge some money.
Have you seen non-technical people use AI for anything beyond read my emails or add a column to my sheet?
Yes, the guy who owns a boat and wants to track his calories is going to fuck around in claude code and figure out deployment, and sign up to some free PaaS and pay $1.38 a month to self host their app.
most apps i use are not AI clone-able yet with AI’s current faculties. i’m not going to switch to an ai vibe code of Google Photos, Tailscale/Mulvadd VPN, or YouTube. For those three apps, i pay for cloud infrastructure. sure, you can say with enough AI i could vibe code a Tailscale backend system, but it sounds like it would take more tokens than my $20/mo ChatGPT plan PLUS a mountain of cloud provider bills and such to host my backend.
i do pay for some premium apps that run entirely on device, like Halide Camera. But there again, is my $20/mo tokens enough to clone a high quality image processing app, to such a degree i will trust it to capture precious memories effectively? ehh.
This is a terrible take. Competition in the app space is competition for distribution/attention. Subscriptions are just how apps convert that attention to dollars. Consumers almost never price shop apps.
> People have been complaining about app subscription costs for years. There's that old complaint: "Why do I have to keep paying for software after I already paid $1000 for my iPhone?" That might actually become reality now.
I'm seriously wondering if this blog is just some rage bait or if that guy is really that dumb? I can't tell anymore.
Another reason that push to kill subscription is that many users just want software that actually works forever—no subscriptions, no ads. That’s why so many of us prefer one-time purchases. I’m definitely in that camp. I stick to local-first apps because I know they won't get worse over time.
> it costs almost nothing to build an app, it costs almost nothing to clone an app.
I guess the author hasn't done real software development. The cost isn't just for the code. It's for the whole process - especially the architecture. Which database to use for the use case, which framework and language to use, how the database should be structured,table naming standardization, best practices, security audits and everything else.
Can AI do all that? Sure, but you must know to ask for all that in the first place. Look what happened to Clawd/Molt.
> It's because building an app went from a $50K project to a weekend with Claude.
Sure, why don't you deploy your vibe coded app over the weekend and see if it falls apart after handling one request per second
Vibe code to production perhaps not, but vibe code for regular personal use doesn’t seem out of the realm of possibility already.
Unless there is inherent complexity in the problem (and assuming subscriptions don’t get pricey soon) I can see nontechnical people getting into designing their own apps.
It makes me think of 3d printing. A lot of people got into 3d modeling because of it. And a lot of people publish cute baubles 3d models (analogous to vibe coded ai wrappers?) but there is genuinely useful stuff that people not in the fabrication or 3d design industry create and share, some even making money off of it.
I just can’t think of a way saas margins will stay as high as they are now.
3d printing is something I think about. LLMs do their best work against text and 3d printers consume gcode. I’ve had sonnet spit out perfectly good single layer test prints. Obviously it won’t have the context window to hold much more gcode BUT…
If there was a text based file format for models, it could generate those and you could hand that to the slicer. Like I’ve never looked, but are stl files text or binary? Or those 3mf files?
If Gemini can generate a good looking pelican on a bicycle SVG, it can probably help design some fairly useful functional parts given a good design language it was trained on.
And honestly if the slicer itself could be driven via CLI, you could in theory do the entire workflow right to the printer.
It makes me wonder if we are going to really see a push to text-based file formats. Markdown is the lingua franca of output for LLMs. Same with json, csv, etc. Things that are easy to “git diff” are also easy for LLMs…
There is a text based file format for models. It's called OpenSCAD. It's also much more information compacted than a mesh model file like STL - e.g. in OpenSCAD you describe the curve, in the mesh file like STL you explicitly state all elements of it.
It's just gimped to the point that you can basically only use it for hobbyist projects, anything reasonably professional looking is using STEP compatible files and that is much more complex to try to emulate and get right. STEP is a bit different - it's more like a mesh in that it contains the final geometry, but in BRep which is pretty close to the machining grade, while OpenSCAD is more like what you're asking about - a textual recipe to generate curves that you pass into an engine that turns it into the actual geometry. It's just that OpenSCAD is so wholly insufficient to express what professional designs need it never gets used in the professional world.
All your points are valid and I myself use these types of apps (eg. For handling invoices) internally. But, the second your app talks to the internet, you are more likely to shoot yourself in the foot. Look what happened to Clawdbot. Everyone who used it had their instances exposed to the internet.
AI can fix bugs, sure. But every time you ask it to fix the same problem, it will come up with a new solution - usually unnecessarily complex. Will we reach a point where the AI can be its own architect? Maybe. But, I know for a fact that it's not what we have right now.
Right now, AI needs an architect to tell it how it should solve a problem. The real value of software is in the lived human experiences, not just the code. That's why we make certain decisions different than an AI would.
Ask an AI to vibe code an invoice app. It will make some really lovely looking UI - which is what unfortunately people judge an app by - but with a MongoDb backend which is totally not the right solution for the problem. That's what I mean.
> If you're building an app for yourself to track your own food habits; why does DB, framework, best practices matters?
They don't, it's just annoying as shit when things break at the worst time for lack of these "best practices" and you know that the only answer will be "do better". I'll give you an example. Years ago I migrated a lot of my app usage to selfhosted OSS apps for all the reasons one might list them. I did like 80% of what I perceived as the "important best practices". Setup ZFS with redundancy to handle drive failures, a UPS for power interruption, wireguard for secure access, docker for application and dependencies isolation, etc.
But there were always things I just thought "I should probably do that, but later. This is just for me"
It would be the end of the day, I'm tired and on bed wanting to just chill and watch something on my ipad, and what do you know my plex is down, again.
Why does it go down every few days? Now I need to go get a laptop, ssh into my server, docker logs. See a bunch of exceptions. I don't want to debug it today. Just restart it, ok it works again. Go to bed, start watching.
20 minutes in.. I think it's down again.. wtf? get the laptop again, google the error, something about sqlite db on an NFS share not being very stable. All my ZFS storage is only exposed as NFS and SMB share to another machine.. Ok, just restart and hope it works and I'll deal with it latter.
Forget for a couple of days. I'm with a friend as her place and want to watch again, and fuck me I never fixed the sqlite issue, nevermind lets just watch netflix.
Over the weekend, I'm determined to get this fixed. Move the application folder out of NFS on the local machine SSD. It doesn't have redundancy, but it's ok for now. I'll setup an rsync job to copy it to the NFS share in case the SSD fails. I just want to see if it'll be stable.
Few months pass, and it's been pretty stable until I have a power outage. The UPS was there, but the configuration to notify the OS to shutdown broke a while ago and I didn't notice. Files on ZFS are fine, but the some on the local SSD got corrupted and I didn't notice, including plex database. the rsync job just copied the corrupted file over the "backup" file.
It's late at night again, and I just want to relax and watch something and discover this happened. I could try to figure out how to recover it, but it's probably easier to just do a clean scan. It's gonna take hours. Lets just start it and go to sleep.
Later, lets just migrate everything to jellyfin. Have auto upgrade setup because I'm smart. Jellyfin 10.8 updates and unfavorites all the facorited music tracks. "You have backups right". "Well, yes I do. Let me make sure I have an evening cleared so I can setup another instance of jellyfin, run the old backups, export the favorite list, and import it in the new one"... oh there is no way to do that? I guess I can export it to CSV, get a plugin to automate it for me. the plugin hasn't been updated to 10.8 but there is a pull request. ok lets wait. Forget that I setup restic to delete backups older than 30 days. fuck me. I have the CSV somewhere I think. God my `/tmp` is ephemeral and I hope I haven't rebooted since then. phew it's there. fuck me still.
I have worked in managing services for most of my career. I know what I'm doing wrong. I need to setup monitoring, alerts, health checks, 321 backups (not just rsync to a zfs pool) and actually use a backup software that tracks file versions, off site redundancy, dashboards for anomaly detection, scheduled hardware upgrades and checks for memtest, disk health, UPS configuration checks. I know how 3 or 4 9s are achieved in the industry.
Oversimplified, Rocket Internet (Samwer brothers) generated billions cloning apps and services. Many other examples exist. Thinking of costs as "almost nothing" is misleading, but the low cost of cloning services and apps is a business model with a strong track record that seems to have accelerated due to AI. Of course, competition within this business model is also accelerating, making profitability more complex, and ethics is always complex in this space.
I think there's different markets though, it's not just the enterprise market, is it? There's a huge market where security audits are not as important.
Personally, for my small business. I've replaced £500 Zapier subscription, £100 Todoist subscription, and I only haven't replaced the rest because I feel like there's not a huge rush. And it's been six months and nothing has fallen apart yet.
You might not think small business is relevant, but it absolutely is.
I vibecoded an app for my business and didn’t need any engineers and it is currently in use for our customers.
I think this is great for everyone to be a developer, the gatekeeping has now been removed and we will see a creative explosion of apps that everyone can build.
The security and maintenance aspect of apps is just a claude skill away to be a solved problem.
> "The security and maintenance aspect of apps is just a claude skill away to be a solved problem."
To think that someone on Hacker News actually wrote this seriously in 2026, after a couple of decades of CVEs, security breaches, and data thefts being in the news every single week and after 50+ years of the industry experiencing how arduous software maintenance is. I doubt even Anthropic or OpenAI would be brave enough to say that.
> I think you overestimate the ability of AI to write perfectly secure apps. Humans can't do it, and AI is trained on their work.
Ironically, AI tend to be better at securing code, because unlike the squishy human, it is much more cable of creating tons of tests and figuring out weaknesses.
Let alone the issue when lots of meatbags with different skill levels are working on the same codebases.
I have barely seen any codebase that has been in production for a long time, that did not have glaring issues.
But if you tried to do a code audit, your spending somebody their time (assuming this is a pro), for a long time. Where as a AI with the correct hints on what too look for, can do insane levels of work, testing, etc...
Ironically, when you try to secure test a codebase, and you use multiple different LLMs, you get a very interesting list of issues they can find. Many that are probably in tons of production level software.
But its up to you, as the instructor of that LLM codebase, to actually tell it to do regular security audits of the codebase.
> Ironically, AI tend to be better at securing code, because unlike the squishy human, it is much more cable of creating tons of tests and figuring out weaknesses.
Sentences like this make me think AI is honestly the best thing that happened for my imposter syndrome. AI is great for simulating test case, and that's it. If you leave it, it write the most basic, useless tests (i mean, half of them might be usefull when you refactor, but that's about it). It can't design reusable test components and have trouble with test double, which i would think is the easiest test case for AI. Even average devs like me write test double faster than AI, and i'm shit at writing tests.
AI is also extremely bad at understanding versionning, and will use a deprecated API for no reason except increasing the surface of attack.
AI is great for writing CLI scripts, boilerplate and autocomplete. I use it for frontend because i'm shit at it (even though i have to clean its shit up behind), and to rewrite small functionalities of some libraries i want to avoid loading (which allowed us to remove legacy dependencies). It's good at writing prototypes (my main use nowadays), and a very good way to use it is to ask it a plan to improve/factorize your code (it's _very_ bad at factorizing, but as it recognize patterns, it is able to suggest interesting refactors. Half the time it's wrong, so use the "plan" mode)
I'm on a network security and cybersecurity tooling team, i guarantee you AI is shit at securing the code (and at understanding network).
Frankly, i feel like the people downvoting my comment, are still using older LLMs. When Opus 4.5 entered the picture, there was a noticeable improvement in the way the LLM (for me), interacted with the code base, and the issues that it was able to find.
I ran Opus on some public source code, and lets just say that the picture was less rosy for the whole "human as security".
I understand people have a aversion to LLMs but it irked me the wrong way to see the amount of downvotes on here, because people disagree with a opinion. Its starting the become like reddit. As i stated before, its still your tasks as the person working with the LLM to guide it on security practices. But as somebody now 30 years in the industry, the amount of absolute crap i have seen produced as code (and security issues), makes LLMs frankly security wizards.
Stupid example: I have yet to see LLMs not use placeholders to prevent SQL injection (despite it being trained on a lot of bad code).
The amount of code i have seen, where humans just injected variables directly into the SQL... Yea, what a surprise that SQL database content get stolen like its nothing. When doing a security audit on some public code, one of the items always found by the LLMs, yep ... SQL injectable code everywhere.
A lot of practices are easy, but anybody can overlook something in their own code base. This is where LLMs are so great. You audit with multiple LLMs and you will find points that are weak or where you forgot something, even if you code security wse.
So yea, i have no issue doing discussions but the ridiculous downvotes on what seems to come from people with no clue, is amazing. Going to take a break from here.
I must only work with genius (or rather, extremely competent seniors) who keep their codebase very clean, because that never happened to me. Even in my worst job at a bank, with idiotic product dev who couldn't read a Java trace to save their lives, security was the only thing that mattered.
But like i said, this whole discussion on LLMs since Opus is out is _great_ for my ego. At first i thought i used it wrong, then my company made weekly meeting on "how to use AI" with devs who swore by it, now i'm confident I might be a bit above average after all.
Maybe it's different for tooling/network/security devs than for product devs, but i doubt our backend are _that_ complex.
Nobody gatekept anything. The software, tools, knowledgebase (MIT, Coursera, etc) were always there. It was a choice. Some of us chose it, rest didn't for whatever reason.
Unless you had an AI write the article, you can't possibly know that. I'm sick of this being randomly thrown around: it's basically mentioned for every article posted. Sometimes the author chimes in to say that no, they wrote it themselves. Other times sure, the article was written by AI. I don't know, and you don't know either.
It's not that hard to find out. Copy paste the text into any AI detector online. I pasted it into Grammarly and it says it's AI content with a 99% accuracy.
Easiest way, however - any article that uses em dashes instead of regular hyphens is most likely AI. Normal bloggers, particularly in casual tech circles don't use em dashes. When was the last time you ever used an em dash? Me? Never.
I stopped using em dashes - because of LLMs. And it's a bullshit way too: everyone has heard about it and it's easy to make the LLM output something else than em dashes.
Pray how do those "ai detectors" work? I trust those even less than I trust ai: AI detectors use simple heuristics and take advantage of your gullibility.
No. Apple makes money from subscriptions, and Apple controls the app store with an iron fist. In a hypothetical world where the price of apps falls to ~free, Apple will just ban free apps in order to recoup that revenue. Hell, if you think that you can build apps for free, then you need to explain why Apple wouldn't do the same themselves, charge users a recurring fee for the privelige of using them, and then muscle out any competitors using their natural monopoly to reap the profits for themselves. Apple doesn't work for your benefit; like every other paperclip maximizer, they have a sociopathic focus on profit at all costs.
Counterpoint, why do current state of the art generative AI companies, with the ability to use models that the public can't even access, and the ability to burn tokens at cost, still pay for very expensive Saas software?
That's really simple - actually writing the software has never really been the hard part in most SaaS apps. So long as you're moderately disciplined and organised it's easy to build what most SaaS apps are e.g. a CRUD-app-with-a-clever-bit. The clever bit is the initial challenge that sets it apart from the rest, but encoding that in software has never really been that difficult.
Having the ideas necessary to know what to write is where practically all the value lies (caveat: there is value in doing the same as someone else but better, or cheaper.) AI can help with that, but only in so much as telling you the basics or filling in the blanks if you're really stuck. It can't tell you the 'clever bit' because that is by definition new and interesting and doesn't appear in the training data.
What this means is that at some point Anthropic will be able to prompt Opus to clone Jira and never pay an Atlassian bill again. Opus just needs to figure out what Jira is first. It's not there yet.
> What this means is that at some point Anthropic will be able to prompt Opus to clone Jira and never pay an Atlassian bill again. Opus just needs to figure out what Jira is first. It's not there yet.
Bang on, and Jira is the perfect example! Because Jira isn't a bag of features: Jira is a list of features and the way they fit together (well or poorly, depending on your opinion).
That's the second-order product design that it's going to take next-gen coding AI workflows to automate. Mostly because that bit comes from user discovery, political arguments, sales prioritization, product vision, etc. It's a horrendous "art" of multi-variable zero-sum optimization.
When products get it right (early Slack) then it's invisible because "of course they made it do the thing I want to do."
When products get it wrong (MS Teams, Adobe Acrobat, Jira, HR platforms) then it's obvious features weren't composed well.
Expect there's more than one {user discovery} -> {product specification} AI startup out there, working on it in a hierarchical fashion with current AI now.
On top of that, it's one thing to write the code, whereas it's another to actually run that code with maximal reliability and minimal downtime. I'm sure LLMs can churn out Terraform all day long, but can they troubleshoot when something goes wrong (as is often the case)?
Sounds like a fun experiment, let AI completely control an infrastructure, from application layer to load balancing and databases.
I bet it would burn a lot of money very fast and not just on tokens.
I would posit another large factor is "owning" the software comes with the long tail of edge cases, bugs, support, on-call, regulations, etc... that an established SaaS has learned and iterated on for many years with many customers.
For the vast majority of companies they would (and should) rather let the SaaS figure that out and focus on their actual company
It seems people are forgetting that companies should develop their differentiators and pay for the rest.
AI can allegedly do all of those. Except perhaps it cannot be trusted with regulations, since that one has consequences for doing poorly.
AI companies already know what they need. they're paying for it. it would make a great case study for them to make a list of all external software they're using, list the features they use (or make the ai watch them for a week), and then prompt the AI to rewrite those in-house.
They just added task management in CC, which is a start in that direction.
This is what people don't get, what's coming up and it'll hit them like a ton of bricks. Software development, after toy examples, was a scale limiting factor for the better part of software development if you had domain expertise. Now, we hear constantly that it doesn't matter since "muh experience" and architecture, choices, tradeoffs etc for which you need seniority to operate LLM efficiently (or at all). This is true, of course. What people don't seem to get that that's what's coming next. Your experience won't mean crap anymore and then the ride starts full blast.
Addendum to counterpoint: why haven't those SotA gen-AI companies become the most productive software companies on earth, and release better and cheaper competitors to all currently popular software?
People always gripe about the poor quality of software staples like Microsoft Office or GitHub or Slack. Why hasn't OpenAI or Anthropic released a superior office suite or code hosting platform or enterprise chat? It would be both a huge cash cow and the best possible advertising that AI-facilitated software development is truly the real deal 10x force multiplier they claim.
If someone invents a special shovel that can magically identify ore deposits 100% of the time, they aren't going to sell it with the rest of the shovelmongers. They're going to keep it to themselves and actually mine gold.
Generating code isn't the bottleneck for selling software.
Those apps aren't that bad, it's just internet people complaining about things like react.
Imo "higher quality" isn't a way to sell software
Because it’s not their business to sell a chat app? "Our company is the frontier lab for AI models, oh and btw we also offer SlackClone, sign up for enterprise please". Their job is selling shovels, really good, increasingly more expensive shovels that keep getting better, let others waste their time looking for gold.
But Google sells the productivity apps and also does the exact same things OpenAI does.
If their work on Gemini is this leading world-class stuff, why aren’t Google’s software products not suddenly becoming better?
Was the most recent release of Android demonstrative of a significant uptick in product iteration? Shouldn’t we suddenly be seeing Android pulling far ahead of iOS in an unusually rapid fashion because Apple doesn’t have access to the same quality of shovels?
What about Microsoft Windows 11? Isn’t Microsoft a major OpenAI investor with full access to their latest and greatest?
Why aren’t we seeing release schedules accelerate or feature lists growing at a faster rate?
Supposedly we are selling a lot of shovels here but I don’t see a lot of holes being dug.
Android is a poor example here especially with how more and more features are moved from the OS to Play services. Google is shipping so many features without even an OS update that's how Android has always been. Even for their OS, Pixel feature drops happen every quarter. AOSP is only a base for others to build anyway, have you seen how fast samsung and others are pushing updates and uncountable number of features. It's not comparable to iOS at all.
Okay, I agree with your premise, but can you point to some tangible acceleration in innovation.
Are these Google Play features coming out faster than they used to in a way that coincides with AI adoption?
Not really no. It's pretty much the same pace as before. I wanted to point out Android is not playing catch up to iOS in anyway in features or quality, it's the opposite. Your comment asked why Google isn't catching up to Apple with AI's help. iOS meanwhile has been regressing since 18 and is a mess now on 26.
Yes, to clarify, I’m not making any claim on Android versus Apple and which one is better, who is catching up to whom. Which operating system is ahead or better is essentially irrelevant to the point I’m making.
My main claim revolves around your second sentence: Google is a major primary source of AI research and has access to frontier models before all their customers, especially competitors like Apple who are clearly behind in the AI race and/or not participating in the same way.
In theory, if AI is transformational to developer velocity, Android and all other products under Google’s umbrella should be moving faster than competitors that don’t have early access and preferential wholesale cost AI infrastructure, and they should be clearly iterating faster and better than they did prior to ~2022-2024.
To me, the biggest argument for an AI bubble burst is that companies like Meta and Google won’t actually be able to show their prospective customers that their own workflows have benefitted. Google can’t say “we now ship major [Google Product] features n% faster/better” because there’s no evidence of it. They might make the claim but nobody will believe them.
Major corporations will try the products, start spending $20-200 per engineer per month extra, they’ll see productivity gains of <5% and maybe even see code quality drop, then they’ll decide that the experiment was a bust.
Essentially, this experience will be the most common one: https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1r6olcv/an...
This I do agree with. All I've seen is reducing headcounts and forcing people to take up other roles as well.
But they are marketing their AI as replacing all software engineers. Their CEO can’t stop saying it. According to them the cost of producing software is now just the cost of tokens to generate it.
They have special knowledge to leverage AI to clone (and even improve) huge revenue businesses with high margin. If their claims about the abilities of LLMs are accurate it would be foolish to just leave that on the table.
It would also prove the power of their LLM product as truly disruptive. It would be amazing marketing!
They care about money, they are making tons of investor money doing what they are doing, there's no incentive to pivot if it would just turn investor money into consumer money.
Their business is making money. If they can build money printing machines, they're not going to refuse to use them because that's "not their business".
Do you really think they would be out donating trillions of dollars to other companies out of the goodness of their hearts, instead of just bankrupting everyone in the software industry if they could?
Huh? What kind of question is that? Who waste the opportunity to win the AI race to become another Jira vendor? Everything has the opportunity cost. Didn’t you already learn that?
Isnt that point kind of the counterpoint to the AI-first narrative. With standard, human driven operations its true about opportunity costs. What we are told is that AI will replace human, essentially saying that opportunity cost becomes cash only. Then the question of why doesnt AI lab start SaaS fully managed by AI becomes ever more interesting. Maybe because it's not that simple. Hence, it's not that easy in other companies as well to just replace devs, engineers and so on with AI
They could always help with some OSS software’s list of bugs and issues.
Waste ? They can become both an AI race winner AND a disruptive Jira vendor. Yet they don't. Why ? To be a successful Jira vendor will prove their point that software engineers are obsolete now. Why don't they do that already ?
Then why are they letting their models write browsers and compilers?
Why hasn't OpenAI or Anthropic released a superior office suite or code hosting platform or enterprise chat?
My guess is two-fold. One, they are specialized in AI. Two, building another anthropic is a big moat and they like to keep it big vs what you could build with it.
Why aren't we in the year of the Linux desktop? It's free and arguably close enough, better, or as good as Windows.
I think in the modern world people would absolutely sell the special shovel, because even if you have a better product that doesn't mean people are going to be using it. You need to have a much better product for a long time for that to happen. And being much better than the competition is hard.
Anthropic appears to have realized before OpenAI that code gen was an important enough market to specialize in.
For now though, building smarter models / general integration tooling is a better us of model companies' capital.
Once/if performance gains plateau, expect you'll see them pivot right quick to in-house software factories for easily cloneable, large TAM product spaces, then spin off those products if they're successful.
100% agreed. When/if that pivot happens will be the sign that gen-AI is truly disrupting the software market in a profound way. "You're using the model wrong/you're not using the latest model" is an oft-repeated argument against AI skeptics. Nobody knows how to use the latest models better than their developers.
For the time being though, theyre going to build their in house software with electron because building native apps is hard.
They're still training up using all of our extensive feedback to improve software architecture. Maybe later this year.
Because SaaS at the corporate level is about liability transfer first and any value or functionality is a distant second.
How is that a counterpoint? Do these companies currently use as many SaaS as other companies? More importantly, will they do so in the future?
their costs are bound to compute anyway, they don't mind huge compensations also - it's not much of a cost saving to re-build, even cheaply, inhouse Slack or whatever?
Bingo!
... and why are they still loosing billions of $? Surely their AI can help them (say) generate good biz models? :-)
Correction: the investors lose billions (and perhaps their customers and/or suppliers lose billions too).
The companies don't lose anything. The employees and executives are not losing anything.
Welcome to business.
Opportunity cost.
Cloning Slack and wasting ultra-expensive engineers on that might be more expensive, and it's not your core mission.
Why do you have to waste ultra-expensive engineers on it? You have agents. And verifying your product works as it is claimed should absolutely be part of your mission. How can you possibly claim that your models are revolutionising software development if you haven't even used them to revolutionise your own software development in-house? Not only that, it would produce a huge marketing coup that would immediately lead to a flood of enterprise spending if you could demonstrate that your agents actually do what you constantly claim them to do.
PS. If you're claiming that coding an application is ultra-expensive, you are already entering the argument on the side of the comment you're arguing against, which is making a counterpoint to the article, which claims in the first sentence:
> The math is simple: if it costs almost nothing to build an app, it costs almost nothing to clone an app. And if cloning is free, subscription pricing dies.
They did revolutionise software development in-house. Both Codex/Claude Code are 90% agent written these days, and bring in billions of dollars of revenue.
Cloning Slack would bring in $0 dollars.
Billions of dollars of revenue on trillions of dollars of investment is not a revolutionary feat. I promise you I could turn trillions into billions too.
Neither of those software are primarily responsible for the revenue, either. The actual models underlying them are, not the trivial CLI chat interface (which, despite being trivial software, still manages to be full of bugs that go unfixed for months). I also don't even think it's true that Codex is primarily agent-written. OpenAI specifically cited using Electron in their recent Codex desktop application for "agent orchestration" to save human developer time on porting it across platforms, which does not sound like a successful exercise in eating their dog food.
If you could turns trillions into billions, why haven’t you yet?
>Both Codex/Claude Code are 90% agent written these days, and bring in billions of dollars of revenue.
So they say.
Yeah this got a chuckle from me.
If you have tools that allow superior efficiency shouldn't you be hiring every possible just expensive engineer you can get your hands on and put them to produce massive amounts of products to out compete everyone else in the world.
Shouldn't they be in place to replace absolutely every other tech company? That is tens of trillions of valuation in short few years.
> For apps that run locally—no servers, no cloud costs—subscriptions make no sense anymore. The only real cost is development, and that's becoming negligible. If someone charges $10/month for a local PDF editor, someone else will build a clone for $5 one-time. Then someone will make it free.
There are plenty of things to be sad about when it comes to AI. But the loss of this kind of "subscription" app is not one of them, imo.
Good riddance to this hellscape of a market. We now face the dawning of a new slopocalypse era, and its whole new set of problems.
It's just the same community of people who believe they are unable/it is beneath them to acquire skills because of some impending super-automation that will let them do everything great that they have envisioned but have previously been stifled by the aforementioned lack of skills moving from one hype-bubble to the next.
Everyone who has built software knows that the hardest parts involve making complex, tricky decisions with tradeoffs. Let’s say you make a grocery list app. Now you have to make decisions about all the different ways to specify quantity. Units, weight, dollars, bunches… oh, and fractional vs. decimal weight, etc…
The claim is that now every random person now will build their own app and have to make those hard decisions instead of paying $5 a month for someone else to do that work. Comparative advantage doesn’t just apply to the cost of writing code, but also the effort of making product decisions.
Edit: I don’t mean that a grocery app should cost $5/month, the grocery app was a toy example and the $5/month refers to an example of a separate app you’d pay for with much more value.
This thread hits very close to home for me. I'm engineering the frontend for a grocery list app as a capstone project right now and I'm handling a lot of the product and feature decisions, and the discussion about "just prompt Claude to build it" versus the reality of those decisions is something my team deals with constantly.
The example of reverse-engineering your grocery store's API and building a custom solution is awesome, and it's exactly the kind of thing that's now possible. But what I've found is that even with AI assistance, there are so many interconnected decisions that make this more than a one-shot prompt project.
I pushed for us to build a mobile app specifically to take advantage of portability (use it at home for planning, at the store for shopping) and the camera (image recognition with OpenAI and scanning barcodes with expo-camera). That sounds simple, but it cascades into hundreds of UX decisions about offline-first architecture, gesture patterns, camera permissions, and more.
The units and quantities problem mentioned in this thread is just the tip of the iceberg. I'm trying to figure out a data model that mirrors how people naturally think about groceries: how they categorize items, how they plan meals versus staples versus impulse buys, how they track what's running low. Modeling those mental models is genuinely hard.
What helps is that I worked as an ecommerce shopper at Whole Foods, and I learned that stores are meticulously organized with numbered bays and predetermined routes optimized for efficiency. Translating that knowledge into a system that can intelligently sort a shopping list based on store layout (which varies by location!) and typical shopping patterns is genuinely complex.
One of my teammates put it well: this is a simple idea, but it requires a level of care, expertise, and experience to get it right. AI's incredibly helpful for implementing solutions once we've made these decisions, but the decisions themselves require domain knowledge, user research, and taste. That's the part that's hard to automate, and it's what makes this a real engineering project rather than a weekend Claude experiment.
Some things are just not suited to an app. It's still easier to jot down a shopping list on a piece of paper than to use an app and a janky mobile phone keyboard. And bonus, nobody gets to sell your shopping preferences or blast you with ads as you're trying to use it!
I spent years trying to find the PERFECT pantry tracking, auto shopping list generating, auto "what can I make tonight with what I have", auto meal preping app. The idea seemed so simple in mind back then. Let me input everything I have, then as I pull ingredients out of the fridge I just "decrease eggs by 3, decrease butter by 1tbsp, decrease bacon by 2 slices" then over time, it will just build my shopping list for me etc. I even built a requirement list and spent a year implementing my own thing.
Given the number of apps put there, from dozens of OSS hobbyist apps to industrial resturant inventory management ones, I wan't alone in thinking this is a solved problem and someone should just have the perfect interface for it. Between auto-unit converting apps, natural language processing apps, @cooklang, a million ideas about tracking pantries and ingredients and their categories, frequency of use charts, etc..
Then one time I went on a trip with a friend to his home town where we stayed at his parents house. His 78 year old mother had a 2 notepads attached to the fridge with a pencil on a string. As she worked in the kitchen, between washing hands she would just jot down random notes, cross others, doddles some on one notepad, and the other she would just add meal plans as she went along. Then when we were going to market she just ripped the page off.
Sounds so fucking simple and easy and I felt so stupid for the amount of effort I put trying to figure out the right app, the right device to mount on my fridge, how to connect power to it. How to make it not always on to blind me at night, but also so I don't have to keep fiddling with it to unlock it. how to use it with wet fingers, how to keep translating units and "catch up" when I miss updating it for a couple of meals, how to hide ingredients I don't care about and highlight ones I do, how to rearrange the interface. It seriously gave me a pause at how dumb I was that the solution is much much simpler and I pigeon holed my thinking on a tech solution for some reason.
Can't sell people notepads though. There is no margin or lock-in in that stuff.
I do hear what you're saying, and I've wrestled with "not everything should / can be an app". That being said, I'm still trying to solve food (for myself) with computers, haha.
Right now, that looks like trying to create a nutritionally-optimal "dog food for humans", using combinatorial optimization solvers. I think I'm going to write something up as a post when it becomes a bit more feature-complete.
It's living at chow.seanjohnsen.com if you're curious! Would love feedback from someone who has thought along these lines.
That's just a contrived example. Every application involves a million subjective decisions; from the architecture, algorithms, to the UI/UX.
A grocery list app is the perfect example of the kind of thing that AI will make obsolete. Why would I pay $5/month for a list app when I can pay Claude $0.30 one time to make it for me?
I in fact did just that. I used Claude to reverse engineer my grocery store's API and build a grocery list app that automatically pulls in the aisle information for each item and sorts it by how I typically walk through the store. It's the kind of thing that would be incredibly difficult to scale but works just fine when you only have one user. No SaaS grocery app can hope to compete with me being able to tailor my own shopping list app to my exact preferences.
> reverse engineer my grocery store's API
Your grocery store has a free API you can use? Even if that is the case, that will then soon change. If app building becomes "free" then the cost will shift over to the data access.
Who pays $5 per month for grocery store apps anyway? The usual revenue model is the app is free and you pay for the groceries...
I think an engineer might, but my mother and wife will certainly pick the $5/mo option every time.
That is exactly the type of awesome app that can now be built. I edited my comment to clarify that the grocery app and $5/month app are separate examples, but I think your example shows that someone with coding knowledge can build something extremely useful for n=1 users which I fully support.
I just don’t think most people will end up doing that just like how most people don’t 3D print their own desk drawer organizers even when Gridfinity does all the work for you. Automation doesn’t fully replace the volition to build a thing and make tricky decisions that are familiar to us software engineers but not others.
Exactly. I think only software developers believe AI is going to kill app subscriptions, because they're the ones who can actually wrangle the output into something maintainable.
For anyone without dev or product experience, getting beyond a basic feature set and keeping it running reliably (or roll it out to > 1 user) is still a massive challenge.
Or is the claim that someone will write the app and sell it for $5 one time or give it away free?
Yes, that’s a possibility! And for app types that have a limited ceiling of how much value they can provide, that will definitely be a thing as an AI app can saturate all of that value.
But for apps that have a lot of ceiling, people will still gravitate to apps that have had more care and attention than someone vibe coding it once and throwing it on the store, just like how people choose those well-built and maintained apps today over using their built-in Reminders app.
I guess for the author's limited worldview - "apps" are only available through the app stores.
could be an unfortunate thing of the author growing up in an era of gated ecosystems.
however much of the software out there - is via web - and some desktop - some internal use - some external - some shit without ui - some billed yearly, some billed by subscriptions
but I guess tell us how AI is gonna kill subscriptions
Actually I've been making several webapps with AI lately, for things I've always wished for and can now selfhost.
At one point I had an idea I brought to AI, got ready to code it, then said "wait, someone has to have done this before me", sure enough, found it, written with warp!
So I can't say it'll kill all app subscriptions, but AI is definitely enabling people to finally make reality out of that idea they've had rattling around their heads but never took the time to realise.
As someone here with limited coding experience. I have built several custom applications that are too unique to be made by anyone. Now I can make several simple applications that do exactly what I need and want. It’s cut out hours of administrative work stuff I had to do. Do I share nope I gatekeep it at work. If only IT built these systems and databases to be easily used by us users.
The salient point is it is becoming easier and easier for end-users to create apps for their use cases, rather than having to rely on a developer, or packaged apps.
The implicit point here is that devtools-type standardization subscriptions are about to get juiced.
Think Vercel, Supabase, et al. Because most of the time agents prefer glueing together managed services than building from scratch, unless they're told otherwise.
And if I'm someone building a custom in-house solution to replace a SaaS subscription product, I'm going to pay lower managed costs without blinking.
Idk I was using Claude code this weekend to do some experimenting with supabase. Claude code had no issue integrating supabase into my application and even do the schema and rls setup. I think supabase is safe because it’s managed, has plenty of features, and the agents know it. That may be the key to saas survival, do the agents know about your service and how to integrate it into their work? …man that sounds scary just replace “agents” with “software devs” in my last sentence. It’s a crazy world.
I can come up with a few ideas that could work, but lately I have opted not to give my ideas out for free. I do think we are over estimating actual apps complexity given that Apple is strict about what goes into their app store. As for websites the complexity of hosting a vibe coded app is often overlooked.
That all said, I could see some killer features coming to AI companies if they really want to make a dent.
I think it depends on what percentage of apps need a website. Most users use apps on their devices, for me, I don't want to open another website when I need an App if it's avoidable.
Thats interesting. For me, I don't want an app if a website is available.
This whole thing of "AI makes it possible for everyone to do it" has led to shit books on Amazon, shit videos on YT, and now we're looking at shit apps on the app store.
As many have said, making stuff isn't the hard part. Making good stuff is the hard part.
Competition is absolutely going to crush the concept of mooching off a simple app costing $6/week or $10/month, but it doesn't matter where that competition comes from the problem is a guitar tuner shouldn't cost $100/year, it was always artificially successful derived from preventing users any other way to get apps. If AI doesn't kill this it will be 3rd party marketplaces or open source app distribution that does it.
I' not sure for the reason that for every one of the successful subscription apps there were dozens of free or nearly free competitors. The app stores have been awash with wannabe clones from the start.
Yeah but virtually all customer acquisition comes from either being featured or paying for ads both of which favour subscription apps over free/nearly-free.
> For apps that run locally—no servers, no cloud costs—subscriptions make no sense anymore.
Did it ever make sense? I always scoffed at the idea of paying a subscription to use a text editor or paint tool.
It never made sense, it was just possible to get away with it because there's often been no alternative for many people.
Good riddance to software subscriptions.
I hope proprietary software goes the same way entirely. If it's trivial to build an open source competitor, why pay for software can't modify (also trivially).
> Good riddance to software subscriptions.
Counter argument ... at what point is software still profitable to be sold?
I am running my Office 2007 still, and that thing is now almost 20 years old. That was a one time sale, with no other revenue for Microsoft.
I am not condoning subscriptions but one time selling software only works good, if your a small team with low overhead. The more you sell, the more support becomes a issue. And normal customers do not pay for support.
Making software now has become easier with LLMs but the same problem keeps existing in regards to support. Sure, you can outsource this to LLMs but lets just say that is problematic (being kind).
So unless you plan on making software that is not heavily supported/updated, and keep a low single/team cost...
If you sold a program for a one time fee of ... $39.
What if somebody now sells the same for $29 with LLMs. And the next guy in China does it even cheaper because his overhead is even smaller. Eventually you get into abandonware where software is made to just eat sales from the bigger guy and that is it.
Unless you focus on companies, and they have way less issue paying for subscriptions (if it includes support). You see the issue. People kind of overlook the cost of actually running a self employed job or a company (this is a MAJOR cost the moment you need to hire somebody).
So no, i do not see subscriptions going away because companies will pay for it. And on the normal consumer level, paid support as the solution?
I buy the support argument for companies.
I also buy the argument that a lot of time people are actually paying for cloud storage. While I'd love to see a generic protocol for cloud or self-hosted storage that every app can sync to, I expect we'll continue to see subscription software persist by locking down and gatekeeping cloud storage and sync, too.
But really I would be happy for that to go away.
I don't use much software that's sold in any way[0], and I'd prefer it to be none. The ideal situation is for it to always be better to collaborate on open source software than to build in private and keep it to yourself.
[0] I do donate to projects I like and use, though
>The ideal situation is for it to always be better to collaborate on open source software than to build in private and keep it to yourself.
This works for some software (developer tools is the prime example) but not so much for other things. Who is going to maintain the MTD software I used for my VAT returns without recompense. Who is going to update the PAYE payroll software I relied on.
Even with developer tools I feel we will lose something without companies like JetBrains. There would be no Kotlin without people paying for their software.
That's before you think about huge corporations leeching off of our free work or the AI companies vacuuming up open source only to regurgitate it for $200 a month.
Developers should consider that most people value things by how much they pay and if they aren't paying anything then you and your work can't have much value.
> Developers should consider that most people value things by how much they pay and if they aren't paying anything then you and your work can't have much value.
Most people in most situations pay as little as they can get away with not as much as they value the product or service.
The only time this is arguably somewhat untrue is when the point of having the thing is to signal wealth, but even someone buying e.g. a Rolex wants to do so as cheaply as possible, so it's only really true when they're directly spending the money in front of people (think bar, restaurant, nightclub, etc.)
I agree that right now it's mostly developer tools that are doing best in terms of open source. But browsers, operating systems, 3D modelling software, image/photo editing, and many others are not so far behind either.
My assertion/belief[0], though, is that the direction of travel is for open source to become dominant in more and more classes of software, especially as AI reduces the cost of contribution and collaboration, and disincentivises closed, proprietary software.
[0] Based on what I and others around me have been able to do with AI already and how fast it is moving.
Agreed, the abundance of many apps and the fact that subscriptions and paid apps are going to zero means anyone can make an app for themselves or use an open source one.
No need to pay for someone else’s one.
And we will all love from fresh water and love, can't wait for that world!
Seriously, you pay for software so people can make a living to improve it. It is a service like anything else.
The paid software I use is the worst software I use.
>Did it ever make sense? I always scoffed at the idea of paying a subscription to use a text editor or paint tool.
Whether it made sense for you is mostly irrelevant. The question is whether it worked for the developer. You can read endless complaints about Adobe's subscription model but the profits kept rolling in.
(Assuming you're okay with paying for software, just not an ongoing subscription)
Reasons why subscriptions may be a "better" than upfront licenses, even when the subscription cost more in the long run:
1. Cashflow management
2. Bypass budget approvals due to smaller amounts
Subscription is not about app ownership, but mostly running the infra. AI is going to make basically everything even more expensive and subscription based.
Your point is based on wrong assumptions.
Yeah. There's a power law distribution in successful apps. The valuable ones wrap content, networks, products your enterprise is subscribed to, or at least rank ahead of similar themed games or an abundance of free with ads clones in an App Store as the "everybody uses this, it just works and you can share with them too" solution.
Sucks for the todo-list-for-x and pretty basic game app creators to have even more competition, but they weren't making bank from subscriptions anyway
That is an underappreciated point. Wrappers around LLMs are _many_ magnitudes more expensive to run than current SaaS apps.
I suspect there's a bit of a chance to learn from history here. It was predicted that radiologists would get put out of the job by AI tools. But this didn't happen, largely because trust and liability matter just as much as the service itself.
This isn't a counterargument to the idea that AI is going to kill a lot of app subscriptions, but it tells us about what kinds of apps will get killed, and what apps will have staying power. Ironically, the flood of cheap, low quality AI generated apps might make it harder for cheap apps to overtake bigger players, because overall trust in the ecosystem will go down.
The areas where errors are tolerated with human / "classical algo" fallback is the best field to disrupt with AI. Call center jobs. Recommendations. Search, Curation. Wherever the current process is already stochastic and has a human or rule-based correction loop, AI just needs to be cheaper and roughly as accurate to win.
It's early days yet. You'd have to be crazy to go into radiology, if you were just starting out as a freshly-minted MD. And yes, this is going to be a problem, possibly a big one.
See also: air traffic control.
> You'd have to be crazy to go into radiology
People were saying that a decade ago, if not more, with machine learning outperforming radiologists. Today we don't have enough radiologists. What has changed since those days that one can again say that so confidently?
The difference is that the models now work. I don't know if you've noticed, but a lot has happened since "a decade ago."
Some of the recent studies showing otherwise are literal junk science. They used flawed methodologies, such as blindly feeding the data to the models without access to medical histories that the human doctors would have benefited from (which favored the human radiologists substantially) and leaving labels on the training data (which favored the models.) When studies are conducted under more rigorous standards, the humans don't tend to win, and unlike the models the humans will not get better.
“Claude write me an app to do air traffic control. Make sure planes don’t crash. Here is a hundred years of rules and their context.”
Video game AI from 20 years ago was already good enough to perform ATC at an algorithmic level. It's not a difficult problem, if approached as a system, because there are no surprises left in the field. Every situation that will ever need to be handled by ATC has either been encountered and understood by now, or can reasonably be anticipated and modeled, making it a good candidate for automation.
The problem -- like self-driving cars that generally outperform humans but aren't allowed on the roads because occasionally they still screw up -- is primarily political, not technical. A rational point of view wouldn't demand perfect performances from machines that were never achieved by humans in the first place. Eventually lawmakers and regulators will get that through their heads, and we'll all be better off for it... but the transition will be a rough one.
Not for technical reasons, but because it enables the masses to flood the market with low-quality software. Eventually people just won't bother because there's too much junk to wade through (and no reliable method of curation/validation).
Definitely this, my hobby is already filled with a ton of sloppy vibe coded apps that all do the same thing very badly with awful UI/UX. They all ask for a monthly subscription and, surprise, nobody uses them.
Meanwhile the hand crafted app that does the same thing gets put in the same bucket as the AI slop ones and is ignored.
AI won’t kill subscriptions but it will drive prices down. Viable competitors will emerge and incumbency will become a less viable long term play.
Non-experts will build progressively more interesting things as model capability goes up - but experts will always be able to produce yet more complex things than that.
So user expectations will keep rising.
The cost of software development will go down for software at and below some level of complexity, but up for anything above that level. The level where that tips will keep changing, just as it always has. To understand this, consider that tipping point across today’s and yesterday’s “hand-typed software”: it has been moving the whole time, thanks to frameworks and libraries and languages improving.
The world of software will remain much as it is today - a mix of free and non-free stuff. But on average and in the large it’ll be of way higher quality, and bring corresponding improvements in your quality of life.
I think that even if everything can be copied, some platforms are still hard to copy, and some have greater barriers that are legal compliance, and others needs to be able to scale to be viable. Even if apps can be copied, the underlying architectural decisions are usually not so visible as the interface, and the developer should have a good knowledge of building architectures to add value to the existing apps.
My guess is that copying is not enough, but adding value or saving costs is.
I’ve been talking about this a lot with founder/coder types in my circle of friends with a wide variety of opinions.
My theory as an old guy is that the standards will just go up.
There’s a current business model where you can make a basic but useful tool that solves a specific business problem and make money. That’s going to end.
We’ve seen this before. A good example would be when the mobile app stores launched and you could get traction with just about anything. And then you couldn’t.
> There’s a current business model where you can make a basic but useful tool that solves a specific business problem and make money. That’s going to end.
I don't know... Because the tool that solves a specific business problem usually requires tons of business expertise. And when company buy this tool, they mainly do it for the expertise diluted in it.
If they didn't already made their own in-house implementation, it's because they don't want to invest in maintaining the tool that requires expertise outside of their actual business.
Meanwhile, the company building the tool can invest in keeping this expertise because it's financed by the multiple companies paying for the tool.
> the standards will just go up.
This industry is in a deep quality slump. If it takes an existential threat to improve that, then it's all good news
That's what I think will happen. Not just standards but taste and design as well. I think there's almost even more demand for good designers now than ever before.
Why? VERY good design signals this is tasteful and quality. Not an AI-slop-vibe-mess.
Isn't such design something that is super easy to copy by AI anyways? Spend months working on it, and you'll just get lots of clones the next week.
> Why? VERY good design signals this is tasteful and quality. Not an AI-slop-vibe-mess.
I'm not too sure about this. Very good design, at least in terms of marketing materials such as screenshots, may be end up signalling the use of AI in the coding as well. I know if an app has obviously-AI-generated photos in the screenshots I would be disinclined even to try it.
I hadn't heard the app store submission stats. Does this answer Mike Judge's question of where the shovelware is [0,1]? Did we just need to wait a few months?
[0] https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46262545
That essay was written weeks before Opus 4.5 was released which was an inflection point for the ability of Claude code and specifically how well it would work with less guidance.
People will still pay for convenience or functionality.
If there is a feature that cannot be done on-device, and that on-Internet feature can be effectively moated and duplication-resisted, then if it’s a feature that people think they need they will absolutely open their wallets to pay for.
The trick is finding that feature or attribute that cannot be done on-device, and then moating it against AI duplication. Do that, make it appear indispensable in the minds of people, and they will absolutely pay for it.
Yes but they will pay less because there will 50 competitors who provide similar enough software for fraction of prices. Having a moar that’s not replicable for cheaper is rare
The race to the bottom.
I wonder if this will wind up being true. Yes it’s cheaper to produce an app but most normies I know don’t really want to produce an app. No instead they want to consume a curated app. If anything we’ve moved the value proposition from “it exists” to “it exists and is good, especially compared to the competition.”
App creators will be competing and copying each other. The software that can support change will probably win in the market. Probably…?
What the OP says someone else will do it cheaper not the normies will do themselves. We already have tons of free and cheap software for the sake of it without making any commercial sense, now we will have way more it.
It’s inevitable at this point.
I believe we are having this discussion from a purely technical perspective and not from a business one. Let's take slack for example. Assuming a company can perfectly clone it, why would they? Yes they would skip paying for it, but they would have to maintain it, starting from its infrastructure all they way up to its UI. Will they think of new features? Will they follow industry developments in sound / streaming technology? Will they keep integrating other tools into it? I am sure they would rather pay to have somebody else do it for them, someone like slack itself.
Also, assuming a company has the capital to burn through enough tokens to create something so big and complex, why spend it on an internal tool? Shouldn't they be spinning slack-sized apps to expand their existing market share or try to disrupt new markets?
> it costs almost nothing to build an app, it costs almost nothing to clone an app.
For the types of apps that AI can clone on its own, this has always been true. It's the eternal bookstore example, recipe collection, or my-dvd-collection app. The type of apps that Basic and Visual Basic were designed for.
If there was value in selling subscriptions to an app like this, it was probably coincidental.
I don't agree with the premise that we pay a subscription because there is no better and cheaper alternative. We pay Slack subscriptions but we could get IRC for free. We pay Google Drive subscription but we could get rsync for free.
The reason we pay a subscription is because the company that built the software knows our business, knows how to get in touch with the decision maker, and knows how to market their product as something desirable. The actual software has little influence in that decision.
On the contrary, I think the price of SaaS subscriptions will go up as a result of AI. Because the only customers who will switch to a cheaper (or home made) alternative are the ones for whom the software is a commodity. These customers used to form the long tail of subscriptions, usually on the lower tier. When the entry pricer disappears, and the software editor has to generate a high return for their investors, the only way to keep profitability is to increase the price for the other tiers.
I just did this at work, I was working with Postman testing an API and wanted it work in a slightly different way and be able to do some bulk testing, saving responses, all slightly different then how Postman worked. I clone just the features I wanted in about 15 minutes and now have my own API test tool that works exactly how I want. It is not something I would ever release or need to share, just a local tool for me to use. If your software doesn't provide a service, like sync, storage, availability, if it is just local, it'll be a tough market.
This also got me thinking about open source might be dying. For this tool, there is no reason for me to open source it, anyone can create the same thing in minutes. I didn't add anything, the only maybe interesting part would be to share the prompt, but then someone else can create their own prompt to have their tool do what they want.
Software world is really getting weird.
You mean postman the curl frontend with a lot of bloat and an account + price tag? Not really the example of a very valuable app to begin with.
Exactly. I never saw a reason for that to be a paid service in the first place.
I agree that software without a service model faces a tough market. Sometimes, users just want software that works indefinitely on their phones without subscriptions or ads. That’s why many people are big fans of one-time purchase apps. I’m one of them; I prefer local apps because I know the software won't deteriorate over time.
Open source should acquire greater, multiplied value once the new scaffolding is put into place. The open source community is still using the past approach, which is going to be largely washed away.
More people with more agents freely contributing more to even more concentrated and scaled-up projects.
Those agents will get more potent. The projects can get more ambitious.
One user with N Claude usage. 100 users with 100x the Claude usage. Who can build the superior product? If you put the right structure on it, the 100x wins by a drastic margin. Those 100x Claudes benefit in combination courtesy of the open source effect, their potential additive value is greatly enhanced.
The 1x outcome will end up being relegated to triviality (the one page homepage as website). The bar is about to be raised really, really, really high in software if you want to be relevant. This is merely a very short transition period.
>something I would ever release or need to share, just a local tool for me to use.
>This also got me thinking about open source might be dying.
Just because you can generate a wrapper app for a very specific use-case doesn't mean open source is dead or dying. As if open source was all just about people sharing their crappy specific use-case apps.
And software isn't getting weird. A part of the software development life cycle is being automated.
> Software world is really getting weird.
Automation of easy templated tasks will cause a huge disruption. Production of software used to be a skilled job, but now is automated to a large degree. This has huge impacts to the profession as a whole. Already, enrollment to the UC CS program is declining.
From a developer's perspective, it seems like we're at a point where we're increasingly concerned about how to make a living and how to pursue a career.
What if "Stallman was right" and this means users will actually pay people to make software for them, even if it's "open source"? (TFA doesn't mention open source but it might as well be if cloning is cheap)
Probably wouldn't be a bad thing.
Longer term this can happen but currently... I'm sure that even people who are not software people and do this for them alone, if they do this, will jump of a bridge after a few months when yet somehow something else (the vacation pics before 2014) just disappeared and AI comes with 'I found the bug! The migration blabhalbha. All your data gone. Question, Do you have a backup?' etc. And this potentially every change. Software devs deal with that all the time, but this is not going to work yet otherwise. We get tremendous value out of it for our company but we didn't drop our extreme rigid development process for some vibe coding; we vibe code but with a lot of guardrails which we built up over decades to deal with outsourcing companies (many of them far worse than any modern LLM tool) for our clients.
One of our top earners always was(is still) simple; companies to hire/fire cheap cans of devs, but cans of devs are crap quality (generally) so we help companies set up, based on their stack, guardrails preventing full out bloodshed. We always got a lot of flack from 'modern devs' because we take away the freedom; seems it was a good thing; llms + freedom is misery. Well, I guess it's also performance art of sorts.
I think the article has some truth but the author also ignores something important. Yes, subscription costs are going down. But there's a big difference between consumer and enterprise. Everyone needs to build fast now. A company cannot get distracted by building capabilities in-house that are not core to their product. This was true yesterday and will be true tomorrow. That means they will keep paying for quality solutions and not settle for sub-par solutions just because someone made them for free (there was always an open source solution available long before AI entered the scene). I may argue that not settling is even more important now that moving fast is key.
For a company, paying $10K a year for a quality service, that's a no-brainer. Most companies spend that money on alcohol in company onsites. However, if you're charging really high prices (the Datadogs of the world), then you're going to face tougher competition from cheaper alternatives that might be as good as you, and when companies need to cut costs, which they often do, you'll be in trouble.
I think what it means to many software companies is that prices will significantly go down on average but the median might not see significant decrease. Companies will be smaller and more lean, hiring less people in general (not just engineers!). There will be more companies out there, so hopefully it will even out.
Last thing is that every product will have too many options to choose from. This has been the reality actually for a long time and going to get much worse. How you market and brand your product and acquire customers will become more difficult than ever.
I fundamentally disagree with the premise:
"The math is simple: if it costs almost nothing to build an app, it costs almost nothing to clone an app. And if cloning is free, subscription pricing dies. We're already seeing this play out in the numbers. Apple's App Store got 557K new submissions in 2025, up 24% from 2024 (source: Appfigures). That's not because people suddenly got more creative. It's because building an app went from a $50K project to a weekend with Claude."
No. It's because people got more creative. There are tens of thousands of us who are absolutely on fire creating new products, better versions of old products, new product categories etc. Many of us are burnt out OG programmers who have rediscovered our love for programming. Now we can create without the drudgery.
You're about to see the most tech innovation our species has ever experienced. Hold on to your seat.
Both are true. You’ll see innovation and you’ll see the cost of these very abundant simple apps go to zero. There’s no way around it. Supply and demand. Everyone can make apps, but there isn’t an obvious reason why people would be buying more apps. More apps made + same apps bought = cheaper apps.
This matches what I'm seeing. The AI tooling didn't make building cheaper — it made building fun again. The gap between idea and working prototype collapsed, and that's bringing a lot of experienced builders back off the sidelines.
> No. It's because people got more creative. There are tens of thousands of us who are absolutely on fire creating new products, better versions of old products, new product categories etc.
Nitpicking, but I would argue that people have always been creative, it's a function of our brains. With the ubiquity of camera, videos now show that even birds and animals have levels of creativity. Biological/physical/physics/societal restrictions prevent them from taking it to the next level. Look at what ancient peoples managed to achieve without the benefit of modern tools and techniques; hard to argue people haven't always been creative.
What has changed is the ability to implement our ideas and harness our creativity - that has become significantly simpler in the age of AI.
Perhaps the discrepancy between the OP's framing of what's happening (negative impact to developers because app cost has gone to zero) and your positive perspective (hey, look at all these creative ideas we are now implementing) is a matter of perspective: you're both describing the same phenomenon, just different angles.
> You're about to see the most tech innovation our species has ever experienced.
With all due respect, we're definitely not. If any of what you said was even the faintest bit true, then we'd have something to show for it already.
I wonder if this was the true message of the Claude C compiler - not that Claude can clone a compiler, but that Anthropic has built a harness, which it can use to observe the behavior and outputs of an existing program (GCC) - it can recreate it with a good enough (at least functioning) replica.
Solo founder running 56 microservices and 69 autonomous agents in production. AI collapsed the build cost by 40-60x, but every architecture decision, security boundary, and ops choice still required experience. The article gets the direction right but the conclusion wrong — subscriptions don't die, per-seat pricing does. When agents are doing the work instead of humans clicking dashboards, you price
Simple takes are never correct. Just like the radiologists example has been proven wrong.
This place is the worst at this too. I get you guys are very involved in writing code that is central to the existence of a software product - but you are not a product designer nor manager. Meaning you dont get people and how they view their choice set and more importantly how they make decisions.
For if you did.. you'd all be shipping your own products and highly successful. But most of you are not shipping your own products with large success behind it. So quit the crap.
I have no idea where this theory that SaaS is dead because vibe coding came from.
My best bet is that some NYC traders take on agents was to post the same bullish take a million times in order to drive tech stocks (which make up the most of the market cap), and buy them for low.
I don’t want to speculate who is behind that. Clearly some SaaS shops are way overpriced but this is in no way the end of the business modell. Some contrarian will find the right timing to counter play and become more wealthy…
> If someone charges $10/month for a local PDF editor, someone else will build a clone for $5 one-time. Then someone will make it free.
There are free PDF editors, but that hasn't changed the fact people pay for them. I don't think this is going to work out like the article thinks it is, unless AI is really easy to use, and does a very good job, but there's always going to be that last 5% of quality that people will want to pay for.
Free sites steal your data. Besides people don't care about the tool, they care about the result. People don't want a faster horse. I strongly believe that this will democratize "doing things" with computers where the tool doesn't matter anymore.
Same goes for Docusign - many competitors exist but the reason Docusign is still popular is because they own the verb and "trust" of the general population.
This is absolute nonsense. The app stores are already saturated with tons of free apps that no one uses. Sure the numbers are up—10x of infinity is still infinity—and the reason Apple doesn't care is because this is just the natural end game of their strategy to commoditize their complement.
When it comes to software subscriptions, the bar is just that much higher. Not only do you have to pass the threshold for someone to even adopt another app/website/brand, but now you have to provide enough utility to pay for it. Claude spitting out code for a good-enough clone of an app doesn't come anywhere near the threshold. An agent that can write the code, buy a domain, provision and maintain the database, and submit the app to the app store gets closer, but now it's not looking so cheap anymore, moreso in terms of your time commitment as defacto product manager than actual tokens and hosting costs.
The actual disruption of SaaS apps will come from agents that are capable of solving problems autonomously in a different way such that you don't even need the SaaS. I'm sure we'll get there in time, but not without a lot of data integrity and security issues, and rogue agent fuckups along the way.
Building a UI is fairly simple, all things considered. Building a full-scale system? Much harder. Deploying it so it can be multi-user? Maintaining it? These are things that separate toys from products.
It's software eating everything that it can as capabilities and reach are added. This has been going on since the earliest software programs launched.
It's identical to Craigslist hollowing out offline classified ads. Classified ads used to be a hyper lucrative market for newspapers (both local and national). That market imploded from ~$17 billion ($32b+ adjusted) in 2000 to $1-$2 billion last year. Once it could, it did.
AI should enable software to touch more things more cheaply (more efficiently in many cases). As it can, it will. Expect a lot more wipe outs.
The premise here seems to be, that the code is where the value is created. That’s maybe true for some apps but not every one. Apps can facilitate interactions (eg Training Peaks), store data long term (eg MyFitnessPal) or act as a part of a complex network of complementary goods (eg Garmin Connect). The last part is especially important: the ability to create something does not necessarily mean the ability to gain value from it.
Oh, thank god, it had been a week since we last saw a post about AI killing something. It’s subscriptions this time, all users will be vibe coding apps on their spare time.
The article's right that build costs are collapsing, but that was rarely the hard part. The cost of a real product is architecture decisions, security, data modeling, ops — stuff that doesn't disappear because Claude wrote your CRUD layer.
What I think actually changes is the packaging. Per-seat subscriptions assumed humans in dashboards. That's the part on borrowed time. The workflow logic underneath still has value — it just gets consumed differently as agents start doing the clicking.
> The math is simple: if it costs almost nothing to build an app, it costs almost nothing to clone an app. And if cloning is free, subscription pricing dies
Yes and no.
I have created 15 small apps that solves all kinds of things for me. However, at the department I work full of non-technical people, most of them don’t even know lovable exists.
And for the one that does know lovable exists, they tend to build stuff with some botched backend and you’ll get to scaling issues, security issues and who knows what else
They know ChatGPT exists and soon enough that'll probably be enough for many use cases.
Exactly.
AI can produce mediocre or outright bad code no problem.
It was trained on the average, not just on Carmack level code...
It needs to be checked by a professional.
This won't ever change with LLMs or gen AI like it is now
One of the reasons I built pocket.codes https://www.linkedin.com/posts/afedosov_when-i-started-my-ca...
Apple is being Apple and not letting me to release it however :(
I wrote an article about this a few days ago that has been gaining a lot of traction: https://finbarr.site/2026/02/12/in-defense-of-saas.html
Point solutions are going to be free. Complex systems with support, integrations, switching costs, customer data, etc., are not going to be free.
Those platforms with a moat have some breathing room but it's only a matter of time. Remember Lotus Notes?
> This is the same dynamic that kept IBM dominant for decades
IBM still sells mainframes but is no longer a growth darling.
> Markets are right to reassess multiples. But reassessing multiples is very different from pricing in extinction
What you are missing is that the SaaS companies were extremely overpriced. For instance, crm after all the carnage is still priced at 25 times earnings which is historically high for anything that is not a growth company. The perception was that these companies would print money year after year selling software trinkets on their platforms and as such were placed in the growth category. Now, it is plainly obvious that these software trinkets can be produced easily by anyone using AI. Their pricing-power has dramatically declined. Hence the re-rating. None of this contradicts the thesis in your ai-assisted article that these businesses have moats just like IBM and its mainframes. These businesses are now in a vicious reflexive narrative loop where the narrative will impact the real-world which will further fuel the narrative.
By using an external service, people outsource problems. Using agentic coding to „clone“ a service by naively specifying the features (not the implementation) will insource the problem. If the problem is static, separated, well understood and used internally only, it may be okay to do so. In other circumstances I highly doubt it. SaaS markt will come back stronger once people suffered enough pain in doing „the app myself“.
> Apps that need servers (sync, AI features, storage) will still have subscriptions
This makes me excited about what we will see in the self hosted space. Cause now many can both set up say a S3 backend entirely on their own and write/vibe the code that users it.
Now I just need to figure out the iPhone app ecosystem haha (and how to implement mTLS on it)
A lot of these apps already have free versions and businesses still stick with the paid ones. There's value in someone else taking responsibility.
> For apps that run locally—no servers, no cloud costs—subscriptions make no sense anymore
Never did tbh. These apps should be one time purchases at best.
Making the app is the easy part. The hard part is getting users. Also I have doubts if AI can make a sufficiently complex app.
It's a whole lot easier if the app is intended to have only one user.
instead of random web app to do some modification on image. now I can use ffmpeg assisted with ai. good riddance.
I think AI is going to kill my sanity. But mostly, because the websites are so bad. It's just a chat interface, but apparently nobody knows how to write those anymore. They use 1GB of memory per instance, slow to load, UI constantly crashes. Then Gemini loses all context when you stop and edit a reply. Then the bots themselves with their hallucination, their gaslighting, their covering up of mistakes, covering up that they can't read a simple PDF. Not following simple instructions.
It's like these companies are trying to get us hooked, then try to make us explode in frustration because it doesn't actually quite work. Not because the AI is bad, but because the interface (30-old-tech, a chat ui) is just broken.
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After the dot.com, there was the O-pocalypse that terrified me as a recent grad.
- Open source - Outsourcing - Offshoring
It was driving the labour cost of an engineer to zero I felt as a young man.
Then time passed, and I learnt that engineers aren't paid to code. Engineers are paid to solve problems for a business.
If you recall, the dot.com bust and 9/11 crashed finances for a few years. When the money printing gun went whir because "Deficits don't matter" Washington, then engineers were in demand again.
Right now we are in a weird situation where money is being printed and it is also tight. Most of it is going to the hardware and infrastructure layer, like the fiber optic bubble in the dot.com. Software will have its time in the sun again.
> Software will have its time in the sun again
Take a look at the history of the power loom which automated weaving in the 19th century. The number of handloom weavers dropped two orders of magnitude after the power loom.
I think a more apt comparison is "human computers" and live telephone operators.
What happened last time is exactly what will never happen again because those were all specific one off, path dependent, moments in time.
I think what you are missing is that it might not be possible to stay in business if you can't use AI to solve problems.
Before the dot com bust, I was paid in college to file papers in file cabinets all day at an office. Ten years on from that, the paper was gone, the file cabinets were gone, obviously the paper filer job was gone and even that business that employed me as a paper filer was gone because they were a dinosaur who couldn't leverage technology well and were put out of business by competitors who could.
There is huge denial on this board that everything is going to be fine hand coding on the legacy systems of dinosaur companies. Seems more likely that if the company has so much technical systems debt that models aren't useful, those companies are not going to be competitive in their area of business.
Counterpoint: why even use LLMs to create apps when the prompting session is the one universal app which can directly solve any problem a specialized app would solve (yes, it's all extremely silly, but so is the article).
I daresay we're going to see a burgeoning situations where the software (code) is open-sourced under a permissive or copyleft license, while the associated data, content, or assets (e.g., datasets, models, or databases) are handled under separate, often more restrictive licenses.
Good luck making your own clone of "simple" file sharing and synchronization app like Google Drive!
I’ve been running NextCloud with MinIO storage for several years now. If that didn’t kill subscriptions, I highly doubt whatever very brittle, low quality knock offs an LLM would produce will.
You mean like FTP and cron?
A lot of apps that people subscribe to are for the network effect (dating apps, workout apps, etc).
Just because you can develop and/or run something locally on the cheap, doesn’t mean it’ll have the same value.
The trick with this wave of fast apps will be getting others to use the things that are built. Sure you can build something for yourself quickly enough, but you'll likely need the rest of your team onboard, which comes with a slew of other problems and complexities.
So how is chatgpt going to get me free delivery on Amazon? Not to say, show me Netflix shows, or even more circular: let me chat with chatgpt for free?
Those 3 are my top-of-the-head current app subscriptions I pay for.
Imo those web apps are all infrastructure services: logistic network, content library access, and hardware access.
Yeah. Exactly. Most of the stuff you pay for is. Hardly anything is pure app without some kind of value external to the software.
One subscription to rule them all.
Subscriptions arnt going away. Software will just be like cable and now streaming.
Surely unless you are building your own models, and running them locally, you still have to pay OpenAi/Anthropic/Google etc for the API usage?
And even if you do build your own models, unless they run locally on the device, you still need to pay for hosting?
I love these kinds of articles. Predictions for the future based on nothing more than 5 minutes of surface level contemplation. No sources given.
There's a whole class of SAAS that's relatively well protected and that is everything that has to do with proprietry, hard to get data. For example a big cyber company like CrowdStrike could (and probably does) decare that its impossible to clone its cyber solution because their solutions and algorithms were trained on and improved on tons of clients data. So there's that - the data moat. Other than that I suppose everything that's a pain in the butt to duplicate - lots of regulation, tax codes etc etc. Think Shopify for instance, it's not just cloning the UI and some CRUD you need to clone a whole shitload of boring backend work that deals with this shit - and then keep a bunch of agents to constanty supervise regulation and update the software (And perhaps have a few humans overseeing the whole process); is it worth having the agents + few humans in the loop over paying for Shopify ? Currently - I doubt it. When agent costs plummet to almost zero and you dont need any humans in the loop - yes, probably worth it. We're not there yet.
I mean a 10 / month pdf editor sounds like an outrageously bad deal… that’s 120 a year so good riddance
But if people want to make more good creative games and the store helps me find them I have plenty more money to shovel at them
Look at bluebeam revu for a good pdf editor. Pdf editing is harder than it looks
Nope I'll make a google doc and export to PDF I think.
What if someome hands you a pdf?
> if it costs almost nothing to build an app, it costs almost nothing to clone an app. And if cloning is free, subscription pricing dies.
"AI", the new Napster.
Where's the analogy breaks down is that AI isn't producing verbatim copies. There's no expectation that dropbox should be protected from clones, for instance.
How do you know you are not getting a copy identical to something the parrot found on the web?
I think the options are:
1. Local models or token cost plummets
2. Subscriptions more prevalent, given token costs
3. A single subscription (tokens) to rule them all
4. Apps with use-based pricing
No one should be charging $10/month for a local PDF editor anyways… but I don’t think AI will solve that
I've got the PDF specification on my desk at the moment. 1200 pages of vague details on the format. I don't know why you expect to get a product that works with that for nothing.
It's crazy that we think the software is simple just because someone made it already.
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That would be awesome. Subscriptions made web development suck. It used to be so fun.
"I copied an icon from desktop to a thumb drive to copy the whole program" mindset.
As if „deploying“ your app to your iPhone was free…
AI is itself a subscription. They ain’t going nowhere…
Honestly, AI is just going to accelerate app subscriptions. Since it costs nothing to build now, you can just make your own SaaS and charge some money.
All of these people predicting the death of SaaS are going to look incredibly silly in 5-10 years.
If it’s easier to build software, that means there will be more software. Duh.
Henry Ford didn’t kill off cars because he perfected the moving assembly line, quite the opposite.
Have you seen non-technical people use AI for anything beyond read my emails or add a column to my sheet?
Yes, the guy who owns a boat and wants to track his calories is going to fuck around in claude code and figure out deployment, and sign up to some free PaaS and pay $1.38 a month to self host their app.
Sure.
i don’t agree.
most apps i use are not AI clone-able yet with AI’s current faculties. i’m not going to switch to an ai vibe code of Google Photos, Tailscale/Mulvadd VPN, or YouTube. For those three apps, i pay for cloud infrastructure. sure, you can say with enough AI i could vibe code a Tailscale backend system, but it sounds like it would take more tokens than my $20/mo ChatGPT plan PLUS a mountain of cloud provider bills and such to host my backend.
i do pay for some premium apps that run entirely on device, like Halide Camera. But there again, is my $20/mo tokens enough to clone a high quality image processing app, to such a degree i will trust it to capture precious memories effectively? ehh.
Yes they are easy to clone and for good reason.
Thanks to AI abundance, everyone will be better off.
Only unique data will be worth something.
Godspeed
This is a terrible take. Competition in the app space is competition for distribution/attention. Subscriptions are just how apps convert that attention to dollars. Consumers almost never price shop apps.
like how Roombas killed the housekeeping industry ?
> People have been complaining about app subscription costs for years. There's that old complaint: "Why do I have to keep paying for software after I already paid $1000 for my iPhone?" That might actually become reality now.
I'm seriously wondering if this blog is just some rage bait or if that guy is really that dumb? I can't tell anymore.
Another reason that push to kill subscription is that many users just want software that actually works forever—no subscriptions, no ads. That’s why so many of us prefer one-time purchases. I’m definitely in that camp. I stick to local-first apps because I know they won't get worse over time.
Honestly even before AI, open source or other things made it possible to skip a lot of subscriptions
> it costs almost nothing to build an app, it costs almost nothing to clone an app.
I guess the author hasn't done real software development. The cost isn't just for the code. It's for the whole process - especially the architecture. Which database to use for the use case, which framework and language to use, how the database should be structured,table naming standardization, best practices, security audits and everything else.
Can AI do all that? Sure, but you must know to ask for all that in the first place. Look what happened to Clawd/Molt.
> It's because building an app went from a $50K project to a weekend with Claude.
Sure, why don't you deploy your vibe coded app over the weekend and see if it falls apart after handling one request per second
This article was written by AI btw
Vibe code to production perhaps not, but vibe code for regular personal use doesn’t seem out of the realm of possibility already.
Unless there is inherent complexity in the problem (and assuming subscriptions don’t get pricey soon) I can see nontechnical people getting into designing their own apps.
It makes me think of 3d printing. A lot of people got into 3d modeling because of it. And a lot of people publish cute baubles 3d models (analogous to vibe coded ai wrappers?) but there is genuinely useful stuff that people not in the fabrication or 3d design industry create and share, some even making money off of it.
I just can’t think of a way saas margins will stay as high as they are now.
3d printing is something I think about. LLMs do their best work against text and 3d printers consume gcode. I’ve had sonnet spit out perfectly good single layer test prints. Obviously it won’t have the context window to hold much more gcode BUT…
If there was a text based file format for models, it could generate those and you could hand that to the slicer. Like I’ve never looked, but are stl files text or binary? Or those 3mf files?
If Gemini can generate a good looking pelican on a bicycle SVG, it can probably help design some fairly useful functional parts given a good design language it was trained on.
And honestly if the slicer itself could be driven via CLI, you could in theory do the entire workflow right to the printer.
It makes me wonder if we are going to really see a push to text-based file formats. Markdown is the lingua franca of output for LLMs. Same with json, csv, etc. Things that are easy to “git diff” are also easy for LLMs…
There is a text based file format for models. It's called OpenSCAD. It's also much more information compacted than a mesh model file like STL - e.g. in OpenSCAD you describe the curve, in the mesh file like STL you explicitly state all elements of it.
It's just gimped to the point that you can basically only use it for hobbyist projects, anything reasonably professional looking is using STEP compatible files and that is much more complex to try to emulate and get right. STEP is a bit different - it's more like a mesh in that it contains the final geometry, but in BRep which is pretty close to the machining grade, while OpenSCAD is more like what you're asking about - a textual recipe to generate curves that you pass into an engine that turns it into the actual geometry. It's just that OpenSCAD is so wholly insufficient to express what professional designs need it never gets used in the professional world.
I don't disagree with the premise, but I still can't think of a SaaS that I'm paying for that I can replace. And I have many subscriptions.
> see if it falls apart after handling one request per second
Most of the problems you talk about are problems if you intend your software to be used at scale.
If you're building an app for yourself to track your own food habits; why does DB, framework, best practices matters?
People used to do this in an Excel sheet.
Now they can ask Claude to make them a nice UI similar to MFP or whatever.
Data can be stored in a single JSON file.
It's going to take years before they see actual performance issues.
And even though it becomes an issue, right now an AI Agent can already provide a fix and a script to migrate the data.
My only concern really is about security.
But a private VPS only reachable through Tailscale and they're ahead of 99% of the rest.
All your points are valid and I myself use these types of apps (eg. For handling invoices) internally. But, the second your app talks to the internet, you are more likely to shoot yourself in the foot. Look what happened to Clawdbot. Everyone who used it had their instances exposed to the internet.
AI can fix bugs, sure. But every time you ask it to fix the same problem, it will come up with a new solution - usually unnecessarily complex. Will we reach a point where the AI can be its own architect? Maybe. But, I know for a fact that it's not what we have right now.
Right now, AI needs an architect to tell it how it should solve a problem. The real value of software is in the lived human experiences, not just the code. That's why we make certain decisions different than an AI would.
Ask an AI to vibe code an invoice app. It will make some really lovely looking UI - which is what unfortunately people judge an app by - but with a MongoDb backend which is totally not the right solution for the problem. That's what I mean.
> If you're building an app for yourself to track your own food habits; why does DB, framework, best practices matters?
They don't, it's just annoying as shit when things break at the worst time for lack of these "best practices" and you know that the only answer will be "do better". I'll give you an example. Years ago I migrated a lot of my app usage to selfhosted OSS apps for all the reasons one might list them. I did like 80% of what I perceived as the "important best practices". Setup ZFS with redundancy to handle drive failures, a UPS for power interruption, wireguard for secure access, docker for application and dependencies isolation, etc.
But there were always things I just thought "I should probably do that, but later. This is just for me"
It would be the end of the day, I'm tired and on bed wanting to just chill and watch something on my ipad, and what do you know my plex is down, again.
Why does it go down every few days? Now I need to go get a laptop, ssh into my server, docker logs. See a bunch of exceptions. I don't want to debug it today. Just restart it, ok it works again. Go to bed, start watching.
20 minutes in.. I think it's down again.. wtf? get the laptop again, google the error, something about sqlite db on an NFS share not being very stable. All my ZFS storage is only exposed as NFS and SMB share to another machine.. Ok, just restart and hope it works and I'll deal with it latter.
Forget for a couple of days. I'm with a friend as her place and want to watch again, and fuck me I never fixed the sqlite issue, nevermind lets just watch netflix.
Over the weekend, I'm determined to get this fixed. Move the application folder out of NFS on the local machine SSD. It doesn't have redundancy, but it's ok for now. I'll setup an rsync job to copy it to the NFS share in case the SSD fails. I just want to see if it'll be stable.
Few months pass, and it's been pretty stable until I have a power outage. The UPS was there, but the configuration to notify the OS to shutdown broke a while ago and I didn't notice. Files on ZFS are fine, but the some on the local SSD got corrupted and I didn't notice, including plex database. the rsync job just copied the corrupted file over the "backup" file.
It's late at night again, and I just want to relax and watch something and discover this happened. I could try to figure out how to recover it, but it's probably easier to just do a clean scan. It's gonna take hours. Lets just start it and go to sleep.
Later, lets just migrate everything to jellyfin. Have auto upgrade setup because I'm smart. Jellyfin 10.8 updates and unfavorites all the facorited music tracks. "You have backups right". "Well, yes I do. Let me make sure I have an evening cleared so I can setup another instance of jellyfin, run the old backups, export the favorite list, and import it in the new one"... oh there is no way to do that? I guess I can export it to CSV, get a plugin to automate it for me. the plugin hasn't been updated to 10.8 but there is a pull request. ok lets wait. Forget that I setup restic to delete backups older than 30 days. fuck me. I have the CSV somewhere I think. God my `/tmp` is ephemeral and I hope I haven't rebooted since then. phew it's there. fuck me still.
I have worked in managing services for most of my career. I know what I'm doing wrong. I need to setup monitoring, alerts, health checks, 321 backups (not just rsync to a zfs pool) and actually use a backup software that tracks file versions, off site redundancy, dashboards for anomaly detection, scheduled hardware upgrades and checks for memtest, disk health, UPS configuration checks. I know how 3 or 4 9s are achieved in the industry.
Oversimplified, Rocket Internet (Samwer brothers) generated billions cloning apps and services. Many other examples exist. Thinking of costs as "almost nothing" is misleading, but the low cost of cloning services and apps is a business model with a strong track record that seems to have accelerated due to AI. Of course, competition within this business model is also accelerating, making profitability more complex, and ethics is always complex in this space.
I think there's different markets though, it's not just the enterprise market, is it? There's a huge market where security audits are not as important.
Personally, for my small business. I've replaced £500 Zapier subscription, £100 Todoist subscription, and I only haven't replaced the rest because I feel like there's not a huge rush. And it's been six months and nothing has fallen apart yet.
You might not think small business is relevant, but it absolutely is.
I vibecoded an app for my business and didn’t need any engineers and it is currently in use for our customers.
I think this is great for everyone to be a developer, the gatekeeping has now been removed and we will see a creative explosion of apps that everyone can build.
The security and maintenance aspect of apps is just a claude skill away to be a solved problem.
> "The security and maintenance aspect of apps is just a claude skill away to be a solved problem."
To think that someone on Hacker News actually wrote this seriously in 2026, after a couple of decades of CVEs, security breaches, and data thefts being in the news every single week and after 50+ years of the industry experiencing how arduous software maintenance is. I doubt even Anthropic or OpenAI would be brave enough to say that.
I think you overestimate the ability of AI to write perfectly secure apps. Humans can't do it, and AI is trained on their work.
> I think you overestimate the ability of AI to write perfectly secure apps. Humans can't do it, and AI is trained on their work.
Ironically, AI tend to be better at securing code, because unlike the squishy human, it is much more cable of creating tons of tests and figuring out weaknesses.
Let alone the issue when lots of meatbags with different skill levels are working on the same codebases.
I have barely seen any codebase that has been in production for a long time, that did not have glaring issues.
But if you tried to do a code audit, your spending somebody their time (assuming this is a pro), for a long time. Where as a AI with the correct hints on what too look for, can do insane levels of work, testing, etc...
Ironically, when you try to secure test a codebase, and you use multiple different LLMs, you get a very interesting list of issues they can find. Many that are probably in tons of production level software.
But its up to you, as the instructor of that LLM codebase, to actually tell it to do regular security audits of the codebase.
> Ironically, AI tend to be better at securing code, because unlike the squishy human, it is much more cable of creating tons of tests and figuring out weaknesses.
Sentences like this make me think AI is honestly the best thing that happened for my imposter syndrome. AI is great for simulating test case, and that's it. If you leave it, it write the most basic, useless tests (i mean, half of them might be usefull when you refactor, but that's about it). It can't design reusable test components and have trouble with test double, which i would think is the easiest test case for AI. Even average devs like me write test double faster than AI, and i'm shit at writing tests.
AI is also extremely bad at understanding versionning, and will use a deprecated API for no reason except increasing the surface of attack.
AI is great for writing CLI scripts, boilerplate and autocomplete. I use it for frontend because i'm shit at it (even though i have to clean its shit up behind), and to rewrite small functionalities of some libraries i want to avoid loading (which allowed us to remove legacy dependencies). It's good at writing prototypes (my main use nowadays), and a very good way to use it is to ask it a plan to improve/factorize your code (it's _very_ bad at factorizing, but as it recognize patterns, it is able to suggest interesting refactors. Half the time it's wrong, so use the "plan" mode)
I'm on a network security and cybersecurity tooling team, i guarantee you AI is shit at securing the code (and at understanding network).
Frankly, i feel like the people downvoting my comment, are still using older LLMs. When Opus 4.5 entered the picture, there was a noticeable improvement in the way the LLM (for me), interacted with the code base, and the issues that it was able to find.
I ran Opus on some public source code, and lets just say that the picture was less rosy for the whole "human as security".
I understand people have a aversion to LLMs but it irked me the wrong way to see the amount of downvotes on here, because people disagree with a opinion. Its starting the become like reddit. As i stated before, its still your tasks as the person working with the LLM to guide it on security practices. But as somebody now 30 years in the industry, the amount of absolute crap i have seen produced as code (and security issues), makes LLMs frankly security wizards.
Stupid example: I have yet to see LLMs not use placeholders to prevent SQL injection (despite it being trained on a lot of bad code).
The amount of code i have seen, where humans just injected variables directly into the SQL... Yea, what a surprise that SQL database content get stolen like its nothing. When doing a security audit on some public code, one of the items always found by the LLMs, yep ... SQL injectable code everywhere.
A lot of practices are easy, but anybody can overlook something in their own code base. This is where LLMs are so great. You audit with multiple LLMs and you will find points that are weak or where you forgot something, even if you code security wse.
So yea, i have no issue doing discussions but the ridiculous downvotes on what seems to come from people with no clue, is amazing. Going to take a break from here.
I must only work with genius (or rather, extremely competent seniors) who keep their codebase very clean, because that never happened to me. Even in my worst job at a bank, with idiotic product dev who couldn't read a Java trace to save their lives, security was the only thing that mattered.
But like i said, this whole discussion on LLMs since Opus is out is _great_ for my ego. At first i thought i used it wrong, then my company made weekly meeting on "how to use AI" with devs who swore by it, now i'm confident I might be a bit above average after all.
Maybe it's different for tooling/network/security devs than for product devs, but i doubt our backend are _that_ complex.
> the gatekeeping has now been removed
Nobody gatekept anything. The software, tools, knowledgebase (MIT, Coursera, etc) were always there. It was a choice. Some of us chose it, rest didn't for whatever reason.
> gatekeeping has now been removed
Who was preventing you from learning how to do it yourself and then doing it?
Comments as short-sighted as this give me confidence in the future job security of people who actually know how to write software.
> the gatekeeping has now been removed
'Gatekeeping' being 'knowing'... nobody was stopping you from learning.
> The security and maintenance aspect of apps is just a claude skill away to be a solved problem.
Incredible joke. Got a good laugh from me.
What happened to clawd/molt?
https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/researchers-40000...
Actually this number was updated to 135,000 exposed instances recently
Thanks for your answer!
> This article was written by AI btw
Unless you had an AI write the article, you can't possibly know that. I'm sick of this being randomly thrown around: it's basically mentioned for every article posted. Sometimes the author chimes in to say that no, they wrote it themselves. Other times sure, the article was written by AI. I don't know, and you don't know either.
It's not that hard to find out. Copy paste the text into any AI detector online. I pasted it into Grammarly and it says it's AI content with a 99% accuracy.
Easiest way, however - any article that uses em dashes instead of regular hyphens is most likely AI. Normal bloggers, particularly in casual tech circles don't use em dashes. When was the last time you ever used an em dash? Me? Never.
> Copy paste the text into any AI detector online
The use of the word "any" here only emphasizes that this advice is not very valuable.
I use them when appropriate, and have for long before LLMs were using them. I'm not going to stop now.
I stopped using em dashes - because of LLMs. And it's a bullshit way too: everyone has heard about it and it's easy to make the LLM output something else than em dashes.
Pray how do those "ai detectors" work? I trust those even less than I trust ai: AI detectors use simple heuristics and take advantage of your gullibility.
Eh, sometimes you know.
This is yet another fairytale to sell us more “AI” subscriptions.
This is good.
This is AI abundance for all and for free.
Also the end of the app store grifting.
I welcome this, having an app was never a competitive advantage at all.
No. Apple makes money from subscriptions, and Apple controls the app store with an iron fist. In a hypothetical world where the price of apps falls to ~free, Apple will just ban free apps in order to recoup that revenue. Hell, if you think that you can build apps for free, then you need to explain why Apple wouldn't do the same themselves, charge users a recurring fee for the privelige of using them, and then muscle out any competitors using their natural monopoly to reap the profits for themselves. Apple doesn't work for your benefit; like every other paperclip maximizer, they have a sociopathic focus on profit at all costs.