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.
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.
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.
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.
onion2k|16 days ago
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.
ethbr1|16 days ago
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.
yellowapple|16 days ago
ej88|16 days ago
For the vast majority of companies they would (and should) rather let the SaaS figure that out and focus on their actual company
exe34|16 days ago
joquarky|16 days ago
Keyframe|16 days ago
MontyCarloHall|16 days ago
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.
tayo42|16 days ago
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
hxugufjfjf|16 days ago
Keyframe|16 days ago
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.
Aerroon|15 days ago
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.
ethbr1|16 days ago
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.
plagiarist|16 days ago
bsder|15 days ago
vntok|16 days ago
bieganski|16 days ago
OtomotO|16 days ago
deterministic|15 days ago
robocat|15 days ago
The companies don't lose anything. The employees and executives are not losing anything.
Welcome to business.
dist-epoch|16 days ago
Cloning Slack and wasting ultra-expensive engineers on that might be more expensive, and it's not your core mission.
anonymous908213|16 days ago
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.
Ekaros|16 days ago
Shouldn't they be in place to replace absolutely every other tech company? That is tens of trillions of valuation in short few years.