The minimum viable unit of saleable software

cwmoore

“buy vs. build. . . the calculus changed”

applfanboysbgon

Be careful with making decisions about your livelihood based on a rational calculus. As you correctly point out, there is a threshold for which a programmer or company should not even blink at the cost of software. It's often the case that if the software they're buying saves one single hour of productivity, it's value-positive... and yet they won't buy it. Individual devs are notorious for refusing to pay a cent out of their own wallet, turning up their noses at anything that isn't offered open source and completely free. Enterprises manage to saddle what should be a no-brainer trivial expense into dozens of hours of bureaucracy that cost two orders of magnitude more than the expense the bureaucracy is for. Your customers are more irrational than you are, and your appeal to them will likely need to resonate with them on an emotional level rather than logical one. I would argue that marketing is the hardest part of entrepreneurship, by far.

deftio

Truly agree with the framing of buy vs build. Also, some software businesses use a ton of aggregated or hard to get data which needs to be synthesized and that doesn't go away even if the llm driven coding is cheap.

ahamilton454

I like that you point out that the cost to build software is still not 0. And in my expirence it’s further from 0 than I would expect. I often find myself thinking I can rebuild a project (or usually improve upon an existing one) in just a few days. And yet when it comes down to making anything well, it still takes time and iteration. It’s a bit funny because I felt this way before coding agents as well, like you could clone something in just a few weeks. But in practice my expectations are rarely accurate.

monkeydust

I wouldn't underestimate the community effect of software. There are plenty of features that get shipped because a small but important minority requested them, only to benefit the long tail of users who never knew to ask for such a feature but now find it indispensable. If everyone is building their own isolated solutions, how does this positive externality manifest itself?

piterrro

Good luck on your new endeavour! Selling to devs is hard, did you consider building in public? That would def help get traction imo. Your point about considering API design and overall architecture would definitely differentiate among the all AI slop out there

imhoguy

Not a SalesForce dev, but there is a bit of oversimplification what CRM SaaS is today. Almost everything integrates with SF today and most often understanding, replicating and maintaining these integration pathways may need more than 1.5 engineers. You then bring 3 engineers (to cover absences) and buy enough tokens. And we haven't even scratched other parts: disaster recovery, security, legal (CCPA/GDPR), etc

zingar

I have multiple side projects that I would never have contemplated building before but whose utility now exceeds the much lower cost to build. I got a few weeks in to each and then stalled on all of them because the effort and motivation required to extend beyond the crazed early days _is_ still more than the utility I get. In a professional context, paying someone for software to do something outside my core domain is still the practical option compared to the motivation and effort needed to maintain another dependency.

chasing

I find that younger software engineers sometimes take the attitude of: Why would I pay for that when I could easily just do it on my own? As they grow and gain more responsibilities that flips to: Why would I build and maintain something on my own when I could pay someone else a few bucks to do it? At least I feel I went through this change as I grew professionally... So many things I am completely capable of doing on my own I simply don’t want to. I have better things to do. More valuable things. Yes, build versus buy. The eternal question!

drchaim

Brandur of course knows more than me, and his framing sounds correct. I would be worried about whether the TAM of Go + Postgres is enough for business sustainability, but that says probably more about my fears than the reality in this huge market called “internet”

holistio

1.) your site looks gorgeous 2.) so does the Bulgarian scene from the top, added it to my list 3.) excellent thinking, I'm wishing you good luck

stevenjgarner

I think this is a well thought out understanding of your specific snapshot in time. However these are indeed exponential times. It may be more realistic to do your calculus on time shifting assumptions, especially given how clear you are about the development time and life cycle of the product.

jwitchel

I recently asked Claude to duplicate Google Docs. It practically threw up. I tried to have it write a plan, decompose it, deobfuscate it. It gave me all sorts of reasons why this was a terrible idea. I've never seen it resist a task so directly and relentlessly. It knew. One point worth considering is that tools like Jira and Salesforce have dozens of screens and modals. But you only ever look at one at a time. So the enormity of the ask "duplicate Jira" is hard to see in its totality. With Google docs, the entirety of the tool is almost one screen. It resists decomposition. So the true gravity of the request is more in your face. You say you want to duplicate Asana or Service Now or Jira or Zendesk? Great, here's the keys to the car, a tank of gas, and a quarter to call me on a payphone when you get there. Oh wait payphones don't exist anymore...but it doesn't matter because you're never getting there. These software platforms are built by thousands of engineers over more than a decade of dedicated work. They are they way they are for reasons. To think someone can duplicate them with some clever prompting is to completely fail to understand the scale of the problem at hand.

CrzyLngPwd

I am forced to use jira soon as I was using BB issues and that is expiring soon. So I'll build something simple for us, that integrates with our systems and how we like to do things. It won't cost us much since our meagre requirements are nothing comparted to a full fledged Jira replacement. Without LLMs it would have taken maybe a couple of days effort and perhaps an hour a month to fix any bugs we miss or add an extra overlooked feature. With LLMs ... we shall see. We won't set out to solve all of the world's issue tracking problems, so that will save a lot of time. KISS is the goal.

bze12

“Build vs buy” assumes that there are only two parties. If it’s easier to build internally, then it’s easier for a 3rd party competitor to enter the market and bid the price down. I think the "zone of viability" is real, it just narrows and shifts downward. The author hints at this in a footnote: > It does, however, pencil out to use a different product instead. In this particular case, it’s easy: use Linear instead of Jira.

ChrisMarshallNY

> the internet’s most wretched hive of engagement farmers and master solicitors of fake information and fictional anecdotes, LinkedIn Great quote!

carlosjobim

In business you should focus more on how much you can make than on how much you can save. If you are lucky to have talented staff on your payroll, they should put their hard work into things which increase business revenue and profit, not things which reduce expenses. Unless there's an expense which is outrageous. If that engineer in the article example can build a Salesforce clone, then he can instead build more valuable software which the business can sell for a profit. It could be a Salesforce clone even.

ThePhysicist

Corporations will be quite happy with really simple features if they're packaged right. I'm selling software that mostly does things that a good programmer could whip up in a couple of days or weeks, but what cost me most of the development time wasn't the features but all the FUD around them e.g. SSO, multitenancy, audit logs, corporate design support, ... Most enterprise software could be replaced with simple scripts and command line tools if they had this enterprise layer. I'd wager tons of SaaS is just simple open-source software and libraries behind a management layer.

andai

> Are you crazy?! Anything you ship can be instantly displaced by an internal package built by an LLM! That's funny, the first thing every LLM I use generally does is install a bunch of third party packages...

globalnode

Not everyone is a 200k engineer. Even kids with some hacker skills or university students with time > salary, who have access to LLM's, will start making cheaper alternatives and get into business that way for themselves.