I've heard some variant of the SaaS doomsday prophecy dozens of times over the past year. Somehow, SaaS is still here and more or less looks the same.

It will probably continue to exist because most businesses are perfectly content to outsource tech problems to someone else for a reasonable fee, and if you think that managing an agent swarm is a seamless replacement for that, I don't know what you tell you. The vast majority of business owners don't want the added complexity in their life.

And for the same reason, most SaaS will probably not migrate to some radically new UX paradigm. Some of it will be vibecoded, but the UX will probably continue to be deterministic. I think this might change once a new breed of "LLM-native" business owners takes charge, but that's going to be a slow process, and it will be hampered by prosaic concerns about interoperability, support, predictable cost, and liability for mistakes (from "the agent did a bit of tax fraud" to "the agent decided to hack my competition").

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jerf 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

No amount of AI, barring something not just superhuman but radically superhuman, can substitute for contact with the real world: https://jerf.org/iri/post/2026/what_value_code_in_ai_era/

Again, barring radical superhumanity, in many cases companies do not today want their own bespoke solutions to a problem and wouldn't want it even if the developers were working for free, because the other costs to the business would still be more than they want to pay and more than another business can charge to make the problem more thoroughly (even if not completely) go away.

I suspect this is another reason you may see some companies making grabs at data and points-of-presence that otherwise make little or no sense... they're trying to colonize and defend the sources of contact with the real world before someone else gets there and locks them out.

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true_religion 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I see it differently. For every business, there are two types of probelms: (1) core concerns which are problems that cost significant time/money or earn money, and (2) things that are insignificant to the business.

With insignificant concerns, at times it seems a business might not even care about the cost but that's also the same areas where a cut in quality is ignored if it comes with a cut in costs as well.

A lot of SasS fall into this category, so even if AI is not great, the value of getting a solution in under 5 minutes, simply by talking to a machine, is too great a value for a business.

All those marketing sites that might've been handled by 3rd party agencies in the 80s, became in-house clip art projects in the 90s, became SaaS sites in the 2000s, and will become "CEO told his dreams to the AI, and the AI delivered while they were being driven to work" projects in 2030s.

The fact that it's bespoke or not is besides the point when writing up the requirements means the site is essentially already built and there's no need to vet vendor at all.

Now for significant concerns, SaaS will likely still have a place, but some aspects of it will be minimized. Companies focused on Wordpress, Jira, and Salesforce customizations will fall by the wayside since the main company can just say "talk to our AI agent and it'll customize it for you".

	▲	Retric 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		AI isn’t replaced timesheets, payroll, accounting, or tax filing. It’s exactly that kind of boring plumbing that companies want to outsource which is the exact opposite of what near term AI is good at. So yes there’s many SaaS companies that should be concerned, but suggesting all SaaS is ending anytime soon is pure hype nonsense.

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anon84873628 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I feel like you are responding to something that's not in the article.

It doesn't say SaaS is being replaced by agents, rather that SaaS companies will be transformed in the way described. Outsourcing will still happen, hence the discussion of headless components, and the continued demand for SaaS.

And part of the argument is that we won't just be waiting for the new breed of LLM-native companies; lots of existing businesses are being LLM-ified right now, through the process described in the article...

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estearum 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

As a general rule, expecting prophesies to be realized or invalidated within a year is pretty silly.

That said, your point can be distilled down to: comparative advantage. It still exists and so SaaS will likely still exist. But per the article, it'll probably look pretty different (and a lot less profitable) over time.

I think the reason it'll look different is that it's very hard to make powerful software that's also walk-up usable. The idea that you can provide just the core concepts of a piece of software and allow AI to interact with those concepts more directly, or allow your users to use AI to build their ideal (and ever-changing) interfaces to your concepts seems pretty convincing to me.

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popalchemist 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Is the article about UX? I think it's talking about DX. The internals of the company/software.

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zahlman 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> It will probably continue to exist because most businesses are perfectly content to outsource tech problems to someone else for a reasonable fee, and if you think that managing an agent swarm is a seamless replacement for that, I don't know what you tell you. The vast majority of business owners don't want the added complexity in their life.

Of course, nothing is really preventing the SaaS side from operating the agent swarm, yes?

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socializer 5 hours ago | parent [-]

My comment has two paragraphs. You cited the first one to point out what's addressed in the second paragraph.

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