> I'm starting to see is people really questioning renewal quotes from larger "enterprise" SaaS companies
This practice predates even SaaS.
I read this article expecting to see a specific SaaS that was at risk, and the most I saw was "dashboards." (Which: dashboards frequently aggregate data, while the ongoing work of collection/maintenance/etc. is done by more complex applications.)
The thesis seems to be that companies can use coding agents to build one-off internal versions of SaaS apps like e.g. Workday or Salesforce or Slack or Jira or MixPanel or HubSpot. Which, if one could make such a thing for free and maintain it for free, why not?
Fortunately/unfortunately depending on where you sit, magical thinking isn't going to get Claude Code to build Workday, regardless of the quality of your AGENTS.md. Sometimes I wonder if the people who write these takes have spent any real time using Claude Code. It's good, but please be realistic.
Author here. What I'm seeing in particular is CRM/ERP solutions at risk. I know of two people in my peer group who are actively trying to replace a 'niche' ERP/CRM (not salesforce) with a agent built alternative. These are both >$100k/yr contracts.
They've outgrown the current (industry specific) products, arguably a long time ago. The discussions started like this:
1) Started building custom dashboards on top of data exports of said product with various AI tooling.
2) This was extremely successful, as a non developer "business" person could specify, build and iterate on the exact analytics. Painful to work with a developer on this as you need to quickly iterate once you see the data and realise where your thinking was wrong. Non developers also really struggle to explain this in a way that makes sense from a developers PoV.
3) ERP system at play wanted a renewal price which was a big increase, and API deprecation. This would require a lot of existing (pre "AI") integrations to be rewrote/redone.
4) Now building an internal replacement. They would not have even considered this before AI Agents.
FWIW this tool is not super complex, but it is extremely expensive (for what it does). It already has a load of limitations which are being worked round with various levels of horrible hacks.
There are a _lot_ of these kind of SaaS products about, for each industry. You never really hear about them.
Btw I use claude code nearly every day for many hours. Opus 4.5 has been a huge leap forward, I am blown away with how it can do 10-30 minute sessions without going wrong (Sonnet definitely needed constant babysitting). And the models/agent harnesses are only getting better. Claude Code isn't even a year old yet!
Thanks for responding. This sounds like the type of thing companies have done in cycles over the years. Some % gets dissatisfied with their vendor, so they bring in-house. That predictably sucks (distraction, can't keep up with third-party tools, etc.) and so the companies go back into the marketplace. I've even been the one building some of those internal tools. :-)
Overall, that story sounds more like the niche is not well-served by software and perhaps there is an opening for a competitor to serve them well. Or perhaps the attrition will make the incumbents improve.
To be fair, it looks like that fronted framework may have had its initial release after the training cutoffs for most of the foundation models. (I looked, because I have not had this experience using less-popular frameworks like Stimulus.)
I am not a physician, but I expect that decades hence we will see the health effects of repeated Covid infections. I'm guessing specifically around cardio health and dementia risk.
> clogging the circulatory system (hence the uptick in myocarditis and such)
Do people really believe that the Covid vaccines effectively give people sickle cell?
Less snarky -- it has been known for quite some time that infections such as the flu can trigger cardio conditions such as myocarditis. Knowing that, it is unsurprising that people exposed to Covid (vaccinated or not, since a vaccine is never 100% effective) would show similar outcomes.
> before aproving the vaccine, it has to pass a few trials to prove it's effective and safe
In case this comment has you temporarily hallucinate like it did me, I just looked and was able to confirm what I remembered: the vaccines did undergo trials for efficacy and safety before being approved.
I think the part that people doubt is the highly compressed timeline for approval. Hard to anticipate long term effects when something has only been tested for a short period of time. Also during this time the pitch degraded from “you won’t get sick or spread the disease” to “well I still got sick, but it probably would have been worse without the vaccine”. It is actually crazy to think about in retrospect.
> during this time the pitch degraded from “you won’t get sick or spread the disease” to “well I still got sick, but it probably would have been worse without the vaccine”
This line of thinking is so odd to me. Would you have preferred communications to use inaccurate, outdated points for the sake of consistency?
When honest interlocutors learn more about something, they communicate details more accurately. What would you have suggested they do instead? Keep in mind that Covid-19 was as new to them as it was to the rest of the world, and they were also learning about it in real time.
> Hard to anticipate long term effects when something has only been tested for a short period of time
This also applies to Covid infections in immunologically naive people! The two choices were unvaccinated Covid exposure or vaccinated Covid exposure. It's folly to pretend an imagined third option of zero Covid exposure. Comparing to that fake third option does not make any sense.
I'd like accurate communication from the beginning.
>> “you won’t get sick or spread the disease”
I read that many times. It was a totally unrealistic promise, because not even all the other vaccines do that, even after years of research and improvements. (In particular, here is a big trade off in the inyectable vs oral vaccine for polio.)
Who is the highest ranking person that said it? I guess it was not one of the researchers. Perhaps it was a politician that is probably a lawyer and not a medical doctor, or perhaps a tv show host, or perhaps a random internet commenter. Who hallucinated that?
>> “well I still got sick, but it probably would have been worse without the vaccine”
Actually that was what the trials show before the vaccines were approved. I think they had like 50k persons each. The number of deaths was too small to have a statistical significative result in the death toll. It was enough to have a statistical significative reduction of hospitalizations, like a 60% reduction in old style inactivated virus vaccines to 95% in the new style mRNA vaccines. And remember that hospitalization+ventilator is really bad.
> I'd like accurate communication from the beginning.
So you want magic. Got it.
In situations like the one five years ago, perfect understanding of how a new vaccine will interact with a relatively new virus is not going to be available.
Even more, perfect understanding of how good our information is at any given point in time is not always going to be available.
There were definitely some failures to communicate well with the public during that time, but demanding that only definite information be communicated, and then never be contradicted, is asking the impossible.
It also really doesn't help that there are so many people who were (and are) just so scared of everything during that time that any information coming out that wasn't 100% unquestionably positive about any new measure to try to improve things would cause them to shun it forever as too dangerous to try.
> In situations like the one five years ago, perfect understanding of how a new vaccine will interact with a relatively new virus is not going to be available.
Even five years ago, everyone that has a minimal knowledge about vaccines understood it was an unrealistic claim, because many of the vaccines don't provide that level of immunity. If you have some free time to go down the rabit hole, you can try to count them in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccination_policy_of_the_Unit...
I think instead of „magic“ what we should have more of is honesty about uncertainty. The public discourse would be much less toxic if people honestly said that they’re not sure about something and that the policy they advocate might fail to deliver. However such rhetoric is immediately exploited weakness and strongly selected against.
Comparing accurate communication with magic is nonsense.
Both in Europe and the US, the government screwed up badly both mask strategic stockpiles and procurement. Therefore, the official message was that “masks don’t work”.
After they were finally able to procure masks, they magically started working.
That is the real magic, not demanding competence for people whose jobs were literally not fucking this up.
Meanwhile China and South Korea were producing and using masks as was normal.
The second magical part is the gaslighting about the performance of institutions tasked with pandemic preparation and about the exaggerated and incompetent government measures like fining people for going outside, forbidding people from going to work without being vaccinated or mandatorily tested each day, etc.
Vaccine safety issues were consistently downplayed by the media and in internet forums like this one. In the end, the EU-CDC published clear information on the safety of the AstraZeneca vaccine and it was much worse than for mRNA vaccines. One mRNA vaccine was worse than the other.
> HBO may have less content but there's also less garbage
If you leave the featured areas and venture into any of the categories, you will see that HBO is also full of junk. HBO -> Browse by Genre -> A-Z -> any of them are full of junk.
The Netflix featured pages are more geared to showing you stuff you haven't seen yet, while HBO is geared toward showing you popular stuff, even if you have watched it on HBO.
So much this. My inner perf engineer shudders every time I see one of these "modern" architectures that involve databases sited hundreds of miles from the application servers.
FWIW the selling $1 for $0.2 is widely applied to any business that is selling goods below cost.
For example: free shipping at Amazon does not have resale value and is not obviously fungible, but everyone understands they are eating a cost that otherwise would be borne by their customers. The suggestion is that OpenAI is doing similar, though it is harder to tease out because their books are opaque.
They don't eat all of it anymore, even for Prime members. To the extent they do, it's largely to reduce friction for what is still a purchase that will generally take longer to arrive than going to the store. Plus, it's a nice perk that makes you feel like you're getting a deal.
As for profits, I haven't looked recently, but IIRC profits are mostly:
1. AWS
2. Prime membership fees
The latter drives loyalty and therefore volume and predictability, which allows Amazon to e.g. operate their own mini-UPS in the quest to make money on most parcels. They also rolled back free shipping on everything over the years and use it more surgically and with minimum order sizes.
In the current business environment, employees aren't people they're "jobs". As long as they're treated as "jobs" why do you care where they sit as long as "the job" gets done? In fact, you shouldn't care WTF they're doing at all as long as "the job" gets done! Money goes in and work gets done. Simple, right?
Forcing employees into the office is just pretending. Companies that do this are like little girls having a tea party with their dolls. They can see the faces and pretend like their presence at the desk is somehow an important part of "the job".
This practice predates even SaaS.
I read this article expecting to see a specific SaaS that was at risk, and the most I saw was "dashboards." (Which: dashboards frequently aggregate data, while the ongoing work of collection/maintenance/etc. is done by more complex applications.)
The thesis seems to be that companies can use coding agents to build one-off internal versions of SaaS apps like e.g. Workday or Salesforce or Slack or Jira or MixPanel or HubSpot. Which, if one could make such a thing for free and maintain it for free, why not?
Fortunately/unfortunately depending on where you sit, magical thinking isn't going to get Claude Code to build Workday, regardless of the quality of your AGENTS.md. Sometimes I wonder if the people who write these takes have spent any real time using Claude Code. It's good, but please be realistic.
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