The word miracle itself is hyperbolic in nature...it's meant to enchant and not to be used literal or concretely.
No need to be pedantic here, there is a large cohort of the population that seemingly never thought a robot would be able to write usable code ("inexplicable by natural or scientific laws") and now here we are seeing that happen ("hey this must be preternatural! there is no other explanation")
Honestly, the costs are so minimal and vary wildly relative to the cost of a developer that it's frankly not worth the discussion...yet. The reality is the standard deviation of cost is going to oscillate until there is a common agreed upon way to use these tools.
> Honestly, the costs are so minimal and vary wildly relative to the cost of a developer that it's frankly not worth the discussion...yet
Is it? Sure, the chatbot style maxes at $200/month. I consider that ... not unreasonable ... for a professional tool. It doesn't make me happy, but it's not horrific.
The article, however, explicitly pans the chatbot style and is extolling the API style being accessed constantly by agents, and that has no upper bound. Roughly $10-ish per Megatokens. $10-ish per 1K web searches. etc.
This doesn't sound "minimal" to me. This sounds like every single "task" I kick off is $10. And it can kick those tasks and costs off very quickly in an automated fashion. It doesn't take many of those tasks before I'm paying more than an actual full developer.
The humans in the company (correctly) realised that a few seconds to open basically the most powerful productivity agent ever made so they can focus on fast iteration of features is a totally acceptable trade off priority wise. Who would think differently???
1. This isn't rooted in data but anecdotes "One Series E CEO told me that they’re re-evaluating the quarterly renewal of their engineering productivity software because they along with an engineer reimplemented something using Github and Notion APIs. They were paying $30,000 to a popular tool3 and they were not going to renew anymore."
2. These anecdotes are about tech startups spend, not your <insert average manufacturing business>. Nor or they grounded in data that says "we interviewed 150 SMB companies and 40% of them have cancelled their SaaS subscriptions and replaced it with vibe coded tools"
- If our customers vibe coded better integration points for us, it probably improves our overall value to our customers.
- The software industry, especially startups, is such an insignificant portion of the market, its not really worth worrying about. But, I can tell you from experience, that even large software companies don't want their own developers spending much time on accounting, ERP, or HRIS systems and they "outsource" this to SaaS companies.
Yeah, this is just long-form linkedin slop. He's thought-leadering to get you to get his (no-doubt slop-written) guides and do leadgen for his forthcoming saas.
Yeah, also if a SaaS costs, 10k a year, I promise its not not more cost effecient to pull your 10k a month engineer off their usual work to build and then maintain some vibe coded slope everytime an edge case occurs.
Also many customers of SaaS have little to zero engineering staff, they are in construction, resturaunts, law offices ect. These takes are so assanine.
Is there a place on the internet where folks like yourself, who seemingly have a way to think economically congregate? I personally dont know of one, for which if I did, I wouldnt visit here anymore.
So many takes on here are so lazy and simpleton that when you go a few levels deeper all the flaws get exposed.
Its funny you mention this, I was going to say that the only communities I've found online where +EV thinking is the norm is in professional gambling circles. However, those exist basically only in closed off discord and telegram chats, where we are actively manipulating polymarket/kalshi markets && comment sections :)
Even in companies that have SWE, do you really want to divert in-house SWE time to something as exciting as ... accounting rules and making sure your inventory is auditable? Or any number of the weird compliance things associated with most B2B software for a medium-size business?
> we want recent examples just look at tailwindui since it's technically a SaaS.
This is a terrible example. Show me someone ripping out their SAP ERP or SalesForce CRM system where they're paying $100k+ for a vibe coded alternative and I'll believe this overall sentiment.
I have heard this from execs at public companies as well. I think a HUGE part of this appetite is that today no one has yet been subjected to doing business on a bunch of apps cobbled together by vibe coders.
They are just hearing the promise that AI will allow them to build custom software that perfectly melds to their needs in no time at all, and think it sounds great.
I suspect the early adopters who go this route are going to be in for a rude awakening that AI hasn’t actually solved a lot of hard problems in custom software development.
In the world of B2B software many of the 'hard problems in custom software development' have not been solved by human coders either - it can be an extremely grim market for anyone who cares about software quality. I'm completely unconvinced that on average a vibe-coded app is worse than the typical B2B slop.
I too have an appetite for magic beans, but unfortunately, I'll be unable to eat them until they exist. As it stands now, it doesn't seem like AI stuff can produce anything with this large a scope.
So, do their AI devs have deep knowledge of the business processes, regulations/legal (of course in all kinds of regions), scaling, security, ... ? Because the LLMs sure as hell are lacking that knowledge (again, in depth).
Of course, once AGI is available (if it is ever) everything changes. But for now someone needs to have the deep expertise.
>> This is a terrible example. Show me someone ripping out their SAP ERP or SalesForce CRM system where they're paying $100k+ for a vibe coded alternative and I'll believe this overall sentiment.
I cannot imagine an SMB or fortune 500 ripping out Salesforce or SAP. However, I can see a point-tool going away (e.g., those $50/mo contracts which do something tiny like connect one tool to another.)
Everything that are daily burdens and require an assistant are also the things that require the most secure way to access them. OpenClaw sounds amazing on paper but super risky in practice.
Stop this trope please. We (1) don't really know what their margins are and (2) because of the hard tie-in to GPU costs/maintenance we don't know (yet) what the useful life (and therefore associated OPEX) is of GPUs.
> If they stopped training and building out future capacity they would already be raking in cash.
That's like saying "if car companies stopped researching how to make their cars more efficient, safer, more reliable they'd be more profitable"
No need to be pedantic here, there is a large cohort of the population that seemingly never thought a robot would be able to write usable code ("inexplicable by natural or scientific laws") and now here we are seeing that happen ("hey this must be preternatural! there is no other explanation")
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