I wonder how long until Claude/OpenAI eat a lot of the current AI/Agent SaaS's lunch.

Originally I thought they would stick towards being a model provider mainly, but with all the recent releases it seems they do want to provide more "services."

Wonder what part of the market 3rd party apps will build a moat around?

Probably never. There are a couple reasons:

1. We pay for saas, so we don't have to manage it. If you vibe-code or use these AI things, then you are managing it yourself.

2. Most Saas is like $20-$100/month/person for most Saas. For a software engineer, that maybe <1h of pay.

3. Most Saas require some sort of human in the loop to check for quality (at least sampling). No users would want to do that.

Number 2 is the biggest reason. It's $20 a month.... I'm not gonna replace that with anything.

Writing this message already costs more than $20 of my time.

I predict that the market will get bigger because people are more prone to automate the long-tail/last-mile stuff since they are able to

> 1. We pay for saas, so we don't have to manage it. If you vibe-code or use these AI things, then you are managing it yourself.

> 2. Most Saas is like $20-$100/month/person for most Saas. For a software engineer, that maybe <1h of pay.

    |Segment                   |Median Enterprise Price                   |
    |--------------------------|------------------------------------------|
    |Mid-market                |~$175/user/month                          |
    |Enterprise (<100 seats)   |~$470/seat/month implied (~$47K ACV)      |
    |Enterprise (100-500 seats)|~$312–$1,560/seat/month range (~$156K ACV)|

Enterprise contracts almost always include a platform fee on top of per-seat costs (67% of contracts), plus professional services that add 12–18% of first-year revenue.

So for a lot of companies, it's worth using AI to create a replacement.

> So for a lot of companies, it's worth using AI to create a replacement.

I'll add the nuance that those might be big companies with slack capacity, or at least firms that already are at a point in their effort/performance curve where marginal effort injections in their core business are not worthy enough (a point that, without being big companies, would be actually weird). Even with AI and as processes become more efficient effort is at premium, and depending on your firm situation an man-hour used in your business might be a better use of effort and time that using it on non-core services.

AI is predicted to continue eating SaaS: https://www.bain.com/insights/why-saas-stocks-have-dropped-a...

Interesting, so you're saying Anthropic/Openai/etc will get a general solution that won't be hands off. The moat for other companies will be creating the specific, managed solution.

I can see that, assuming models don't make some giant leap forward.

Your vision on the market for this is skewed by the fact that you're probably overpaid.

I cloned a product today that does the 20% of a product my client needed. It took 8 hours and will save my client 2k a month in licensing fees. Plus, I can now add the features they were missing in the original product.

There's a lot of money to be made in small business automation right now.

> Fundamentals of Physics by Halliday, Resnick, Walker

I strongly recommend this textbook. I used in college, and it's really good. There are a lot of problems for each chapter, I suggest doing them as they help a lot.

It's kinda wild to take something people really like and just keep re-writing it while keeping the same name.

They were around when Angular 1 -> Angular 2 right? No one liked that. Angular 2 is good but calling it Angular 2 when it was so different put a bad taste in everyone's mouth.

Google did that because they wanted the Angular userbase, but that alienated a bunch devs and many decided to switch to React (me included) instead.

Seems the remix/react router team is trying to do the same. They built something popular, and they want to use that to launch their new ideas.

They want to have their cake and eat it too, a built in userbase and explore new ideas. I get it, but why not use another name so people don't get confused or frustrated?

It's just exhausting

> Google did that because they wanted the Angular userbase

I'm okay with that, because when it came out I was considered part of the Angular workforce, so I was hired to work with a framework I knew very little about at the time.

React itself is still the same fundamental product, not something you can say for Remix or Angular.

The reason is simple.

These guys are really, really obsessed with download counts. They brag a lot about that in twitter every time they have a chance.

What they want to reuse is the package name.

So now they launch whatever bullshit they are playing with now under the “remix” package and the next day they’ll say “look… we have N thousands downloads per second!!! We are so successful”

They did this multiple times. And will keep doing it because they are obsessed with this.

Working on some fun/silly projects.

My favorite so far is: "The Anti-AI UI Test".

After ChatGPT Atlas came out I thought it would be fun to find UI patterns that AI browsers couldn't figure out like multiple download buttons, hidden unsubscribe buttons, etc. So I created 7 levels of web dark patterns for AI browsers. You can try it yourself if you want:

https://codinhood.com/anti-ai-ui

I found Atlas can get through most patterns, so I created an even more unhinged one (job application form) that shifts the interface and flashes content.

Don't take it too seriously as actually testing AI browsers, it just a fun side project. I documented the patterns here: https://codinhood.com/anti-ai-ui/about

Pretty funny. I had to disable my ad blocker to be able to play it at all.

This is hilarious. Well done!

It was fun. xD

Yeah I thought the same, they're automating ordering on instacart. That's such a small task. I wonder if it was a paid product placement

AI seems obvious, but social video? Are they saying people watch TikToks instead of reading Wikipedia, or people who used to look things up don’t bother anymore because of TikTok?

Yes -- sadly, the hottest new search engines are YouTube and TikTok.

tiktok seems to be the primary medium by which Gen Alpha obtain their news and knowledge

No it's not. It's the primary medium by which they get their entertainment.

TikTok replaces YouTube and Tumblr before that. It's not like people are watching it instead of reading history books or the New Yorker.

And just because you use TikTok doesn't mean you don't check actual news headlines or listen to two-hour-long podcasts.

The younger generation absolutely use Tiktok search to find information.

I'm sure they do. Is that their primary source? Do they use nothing else? Is any of that information put to economic use in their lives or is it just curiosity?

They buy a ton of stuff from Tik-Tok and Instagram ads - yes.

The line of questioning was about news and knowledge, not ads. Ads in anything will affect people's purchases, so that's not evidence for what that question was actually going for.

Gen Z as well. Many well into their 20s heavily consume tiktok.

Here's a direct quote from a WSJ article the other day: "She searched for the drug on TikTok, her go-to information source"

gift link: https://www.wsj.com/health/wellness/anti-depressants-lifesty...

Yeah, I was very surprised by that. Article says:

> “younger generations are seeking information on social video platforms rather than the open web.”

YouTube I'll buy it, but the search function in Instagram and tiktok is beyond useless!

> This distinction is important. Sometimes, creating a separate service is the scrappy thing to do, sometimes creating a monolith is. Sometimes not creating anything is the way to go.

I think this hits the nail on the head. People are trying to find the "one true way" for microservices vs monoliths. But it doesn't exist. It's context dependent.

It's like the DRY vs code duplication conversation. Trying to dictate that you will never duplicate code is a fool's errand, in the same way that duplicating code whenever something is slightly different is foolish.

Context is everything

This perfectly captures my thoughts about the situation.

I don't know why they're so resistant to do treat SPAs as a completely valid way to use React in 2025. The majority of devs still use React primarily as a SPA. Recent State of React has it at 85% for SPA and 63% for SSR (1). Probably they know their answer is unpopular and thus we get a lot of deflection and phrases like "you should only consider a SPA if you have unusual constraints" whatever that's suppose to mean.

I've said it before, but changes don't happen when random devs like me complain, because I'm easy to ignore. So I really appreciate you specifically bringing this topic up, it really helps to get things going.

1. https://2024.stateofreact.com/en-US/usage/

> I don't know why they're so resistant to do treat SPAs as a completely valid way to use React in 2025

Many React of the core devs work for Vercel, so they have to promote Next and anything that leads people towards their platform.

This has been my exact issue with giving up reddit. It's really hard to replace very niche topics without it, since many online forums are dead. I also append so many searches on google with "reddit" because the top results are generally SEO spam.

Reading "You should quit reddit" helped a little. The author tries to reframe your hidden beliefs about reddit like "finding useful information" or "it's filled with experts." Helped me to realize I was spending more time reading about my hobbies than actually doing them. Though I understand it's not that simple, doing requires more energy, etc.

My approach, finally mostly successful after over a decade, is just "no main feed or subreddit pages." Reading a thread off a Google search or whatever because it has information I want is fine.

News feed eradicator extension helps with that across ~8 sites:

https://github.com/jordwest/news-feed-eradicator

There are definitely problems with react, but I think his point was that they're not big enough to justify a change.

Though I agree trying other frameworks is a good practice. See what you're missing, or understand your preferred framework better.