To be fair, writing a SaaS software is like an order, perhaps two orders of magnitude more effort than writing software that runs on a computer and does the thing you want. There's a ton of stuff that SaaS is used for now that's basically trivial and literally all the "engineering" effort is spent on ensuring vendor lock in and retaining control of the software so that you can force people to keep paying you.

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layer8 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

We should also get a flurry of low-cost, decent-quality native local-first software, but I’m not seeing any.

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threecheese 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You might not be looking hard enough. There are a few sources you could look at, one is the GitHub Awesome YouTube channel. I am seeing a lot of several-hundred-stars open source projects with unreasonably large codebases starting to gain traction. This is the frontier of adoption, and my guess is this will start cascading outward.

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thot_experiment 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Why? I don't want to bother making all the software that the AI wrote for me work on someone else's machine. The difference between software that solves my problem and that solves a problem many people have is also often like an order of magnitude of effort.

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raw_anon_1111 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

And why would this happen? Local to what every SaaS product I use is available on my Mac, Windows, iPhone and iPad and the web. Some are web only and some are web and apps.

Who is going to maintain the local software? Who is going to maintain the servers for self hosted or the client software?

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vachina 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Local-first

> Not seeing any

Working exactly as intended?

	▲	wild_egg 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		This. I have a massive amount of custom software running locally to solve all sorts of problems for me now. But it's for me and tailor made to solve my precise use cases. Publishing it would just add headaches and endless feature requests and bug reports for zero benefit to me.

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9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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bsder 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Why should you see a flurry of software?

What LLMs demonstrate is that the problem is dealing with people, not software. Look at the number of open source maintainers who are hanging it up.

Unless you have a path to monetization, writing software for anybody but yourself is a fool's errand.

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AnimalMuppet 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Also also, we should reach the point where you have decent quality source code for a local application, and you can tell GPT "SaaS this", and it works.

I'm not seeing that either.

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sofixa 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

With a SaaS, you have one platform that you fully control. Broken dependency? Need to update/rollback? It's all in your hands.

Local software has to target multiple OSes, multiple versions of those OSes, and then a million different combinations of environments that you as a developer have no control over. Windows update whatever broke your app, but the next one fixed it? Good luck getting your user base to update instead of being pissed at you