The entire saas, vertical software, application-layer ai commentary is about how one can survive the ground shift. It’s like coal miners refusing to build railroad companies. Become what the commodity enables to do better. Build real companies.

The “SaaS is dead” argument has two parts - features and assurance/governance. Feature SaaS is dead. Governance will be premium. But who owns it? moative.beehiiv.com/p/nobel-laurea…

Steam engine companies did not win as much as railroads, apparel, and steel companies. Abundant steam commoditized mechanical work. Abundant software commoditized digital work.

Case for custom software: Rent-seeking systems of records that would toll-gate agent access. Happened in healthcare. Will happen elsewhere.

Outcome-based pricing was concocted by people who have never built, or sold things. The only outcome model that works is a share of terminal value that comes from shared equity. A customer has no incentive to disclose the value your tool generated for them.

The specific kind of stress you feel when you want to vibe code over the weekend but you can’t because you did a lot of it over the week as well and you need to get a life.

I think there is a huge market for nearly free but wonky (unpolished, clunkily-scripted or not enterprise-grade but feature rich) software.

If user interfaces don’t matter and we are going to chat, voice, and CLI, can we please bring back a Blackberry-like keyboard?

It took humans several epochs to evolve and 1000s of years to migrate. The new species is evolving every week and it’s living in every phone before even the current US presidential term is over.

The smartest developer feels robbed because there is no struggle/meaning in making writing code. For the ideas guy, it feels like he has super powers now because the struggle was to realize the vision and now he can.

Turns out PhDs are not going to be in data centres but MacBooks and personal GPUs. Take off is surreal.

Are we the last generation of truly talented brain workers? Today’s top engineer becomes 10x better with AI but tomorrow’s top engineer is just AI. The pipe is broken. Meanwhile the real plumber will keep fixing pipes.

I need some small thing 3D printed in Chennai. Who can do it?

My industry analysis these days has a standard section: What happens to the business post-AGI. Invariably the answer (if you are starting now) is to not start a bits-only company.

So does this mean alignment will be solved? Thiyagarajan Maruthavanan (Rajan)

I will say this again. Assurance in uncertain future is still a defensible play for large software incumbents.

Pick your category, find the historic priors in other industries, look for glorious ads from the best ones in that era. All on Claude. I am amazed how many ads they have crunched.

Lovely song, sung well.

So the real hope is that the next set of models cost ridiculous amounts of money to use and so they will solve cancer before obliterating your seo job. Pray.