| ▲ | nozzlegear 5 hours ago | ||||||||||||||||
The Saaspocalypse was a wet fart that never went anywhere. People aren't using these AI tools to kill or replace SaaS at their jobs as much as HN wants us to believe. https://www.stripeeconomics.com/p/the-saaspocalypse-was-more... | |||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | ameliaquining 4 hours ago | parent [-] | ||||||||||||||||
The argument there wasn't that everyone everywhere would use individually customized software* instead of packaged SaaS; it was that, because AI greatly reduces the cost of building an internal app or service, it improves enterprises' BATNA when dealing with SaaS vendors, which means surplus will shift from producers to consumers. It's not obvious to me that that's not happening, since it may have been masked by a general increase in automation since AI also synergizes significantly with SaaS. (The Stripe Economics post gets into this a little, though it's mostly less curious than I'd like about why the "SaaSpocalypse" didn't materialize. Of course, Stripe has an economic interest here.) * Some people do think this (e.g., https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2026/09/25/what-even-is-an-os-no...), but I remain somewhat skeptical that this'll be true for the most economically significant applications. This is not because I'm an AI capabilities skeptic (I'm not, I'm more of a doomer), but because even in a world where AI is designing and implementing all the software, there are probably still significant benefits to standardization. I see it as sort of analogous to compilers; we might get a world where compilers are both used and maintained almost exclusively by LLMs, but we probably won't get one where compilers stop being used or maintained at all because LLMs write everything in assembly. | |||||||||||||||||
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