This has that weird "AI written" sentence structure.

> I built a SaaS in a few hours. It does its job better than tools people pay real money for.

It's easy to build something for yourself that solves your own use case. You know how you work and what's important to you. Most of the effort in software goes into understand people other than you and building guardrails for them.

> Whatever niche tool you’re sketching this week, a thousand people can prompt a working version by Sunday night

A lot of people on HN are naturally builders. For them it's fun to play around with AI and see what can be built. Not everyone is like that.

For individuals, how many people actually want to spend their weekends building a niche tool for themselves vs just paying a few dollars a month to access something that does the job even though it may not be perfect?

For businesses, the buy vs. build tradeoff does now have some new compelling evidence in favour of "buy" but there's still maintenance needed for the service internally, there will be people with feature requests for it. Before you know it, the company is diverting resources away from their core business for a support tool that doesn't really drive impact.

I think we'll see more options in the marketplace as individuals will be able to get started more easily but SaaS is far from dead.

I expect full circle on this one. Short term - many enthusiasts build stuff. I can fully imagine someone in a given company creating something over the weekend and persuading manager to adopt the system. However, 6 months pass, the person now moved into new role or left a company, nobody knows the product and it becomes just another SaaS just without working support behind it. So for short term it is definitely bring some losses. Long term I think it will bite those who dropped the software. Over-customisation for the needs of everyone is probably here to stay in my opinion

Before the industrial revolution or so somebody coming up in a craft would build a chunk of their toolset as part of that process. Even today many good (not necessarily software) engineers build some of their own tools. AI has made it much easier to build tooling to make your life better. Maybe some could be sold. But that isn't the intent and, as others have noted, can take significant additional effort.

I have my own "bandsintown" for example because I want to avoid the advertisement shitshow. I have a number of very specific tools for building software. I doubt I ever package up any of this for use by others much less try to monetize it.

That is the vibe I got from this article. This is a good concept to have in your (meta) toolbelt.

I kind of get what the article is saying. But I am looking at it from a different perspective.

The same set of things like skills, and custom tools etc can actually be used to get faster to the a product that kind of fits 1000 customers. But the change is that one can build even more custom things for some customers with those skills and tools.

Last year I built a custom integration for a customer in 2 weeks. Now I can probably do it in 2 days. What does that mean for the future, I have no idea, but surely getting custom solutions like this would be more of a moat not less.

> Senior interface designer > The website fails accessibility color contrast

Idk if I disagree completely but it feels like I do. To elaborate, I don’t think we will see less applications, I think we will see more with better features.

My reasoning is people aren’t happy with many of the titans we have for certain apps, uber is my favorite example. Everyone hates the price it charges thinks it’s unfair, but to go back to a time before uber is unfathomable.

That to me is a ripe market to be overtaken. What it really needs is a taxi driver or operator so fed up with the current system they spend their energy organizing and making their own uber with less greed.

For sure not every tool will become huge, but most of the tools we use nowadays started with someone having a problem, being frustrated with the status quo, and having the will and means to execute.

The means necessary to execute get lower and lower everyday.

I don't know if it's a coincidence but this is the same thing an AI explained to me when prompted something like "what replaces SaaS now that AI can build most things on demand". That was like a year ago. I have no proof for this, but we might all just be getting similar responses from similar contextual bubbles and landing on the same conclusions.

Great post except that light grayish blue background is killing my eyes.

Adding to the topic rather than dog piling onto the website critique:

I think "the context" the author defines also includes harder to unlock peripheral components that makes software products in 2026 defensible.

For example, security is getting harder not easier. Enterprise trust rides on needing to have up-to-date knowledge on data regulation as well.

Relationships, brand maturity, discovery; all of that becomes rarified as we continue to reduce the actual product launch curve -- but also the "harder to do" hygiene stuff that takes you from a "I vibe coded this in two days, good luck" to a "your successful company can count on us" type of hardening has become progressively more of a baseline requirement.

All of the comments about the color contrast and mouse click action caused this site to change while I was reading.

>> Because AI is crushing small standalone software

The only thing AI is crushing is newcomers.

Standalone software has expertise and distribution, the only 2 things that matter and that your new software does not have.

Also the needs of a business have nothing to do with software you vibe code for yourself. Its compliance, backups, reliability. Not a few features claude did for you.

"Built a SaaS in a few hours" Yeah, okay so why would anyone buy it? They can build the same in a few hours.

This feels a bit like motivated reasoning to me. This little tool of yours could instead be a seed you build around. Do you have access to a market? Yes? You are in a better position than ten thousand other vibe coders with a similar idea. No? If you have the stamina to pursue a market, you have more stamina than thousands of vibe coders who will just give up.

Another way to say the same thing is that many (not all, of course) SAAS were already service with a software, especially when starting out.

Unrelated, but since I see that the author posted this to HN: for a reader like me who likes to select text / fidget with mouse clicks as I read, this website is a nightmare.

In a way, this new dynamic of 'everyone can code' reminds me of the Unbundling -> Bundling -> Unbundling cycle of how entertainment media went from 3 broadcast channels to cable channels to web videos to our current state of bundled streaming services, with no end in sight.

Not to forget DVD shipping eras (Sony should not discontinue physical game sales, someone needs to get us silicon/holographic/terabyte recording media already), the focus is on the bundling/unbundling of software making. Slack + Salesforce vs 'we vibed our own chat and CRM just for us'...aka a Neo-SAP ERP program.

It's a cambrian explosion of software where lots are going to learn in realtime that the code was never the value of a software engineer / software, the value is in the shared understanding of an information system or workflow or business value stream, that parts of which happen to run through digital information systems.

By the time AI is done with us, its market effects mean in order to stay employable/added value beyond just widget-watchers, we will all be business strategy experts, or we will be algorithm-fed-doped-up mindless beasts, Morlocks vs Eloi, not because of AI itself, but because of the current rapaciousness of business leaders and an assumed trajectory where society doesn't adapt to social movements and actions now made possible by the existence of LLMs.

Sidneote: the LLMs themselves are not IMO going to achieve AGI any time soon. There might be a compilation of disparate systems and LLMs form part of 'tissues' of an eventual AGI, but not currently.

Definitely. I wonder if this will be an increasing factor when choosing vendors. Will the security risk drive companies away from small software, due to their use of AI? Will we see a bundling of features in big established vendors?

Will they invest more into in-house security? (Doubting the last one).

For small apps used to deliver a service in my examples, I believe the risk surface is way narrower, which might make it more acceptable. For better of for worse