Am I too naive in thinking the answer is rather simple? Cryptographic proofs (digital signatures). For text this should be trivial and for streaming video/audio you can probably hash and sign packets or maybe at least keyframes or something?
True, I can only know that the owner of the private key signed but not how the document was created. But I suppose there is some trust involved that a person I know who signs doesn't sign some AI generated stuff.
To establish the initial link, I suppose we need something more mainstream/scalable than the old key signing parties I remember from CCC etc.
But at least for friends and family it should be possible to create some flow where every member has a key-combo and you trust them to only sign stuff they wrote etc. and have local mini-keysign parties.
You have far too much faith in humanity. The majority of my extended family members are not smart enough to resist continuous attacks and would eventually not only sign, but give away the key in question.
Simply put I think we are stretching humanity farther than intellectual ability allows in a lot of people.
Do we need new key signing for friends/family? I can trust that all messages coming from a friend/family’s account originated from them, or else their account was compromised. I don’t see how a ‘non-ai’ key adds enough more trust to be worth it.
I never developed with Flash but my understanding is that "modern web" can do everything Flash was used for. So my understanding is that most useful thing is probably the .fla importer. Wouldn't it make sense to focus on authoring-tooling (animator+developer coop) and the importer but "export" to standard web tech?
"I never developed with Flash but my understanding is that "modern web" can do everything Flash was used for."
True, it can, BUT what's lacking in the total arena is actual authoring and development toolchains, which is what Flash packaged all in one single bundle.
I'm not trying to install 4 or 5 different things, along with all of their dependencies, just to make some 200MB thing that could have been done in 20MB and one program with Flash.
Often in these threads people say that thing does exist (Adobe Animate) and it's all fine, prblmslvd. Rarely are those people who themselves used Flash extensively (although some probably exist). There's something missing though, something went wrong in the transition from Flash to Animate.
Part of the beauty of working with Flash, at least as a newcomer or someone who leaned more towards graphics/animation than code, came down to a couple of main points:
- Code was *inside* MovieClips (in Flash [almost] everything was a MovieClip, basically a timeline of frames). Code was attached to frames. When the playhead entered the frame, the script would run. Some of us who started as designers later leaned heavily into the code, but even those who were more comfortable sticking to the visual side of things would end up with a little grab bag full of scripts/snippets that they could just copy/paste into a frame and tweak without getting too bogged down with code. Even at a very simple level (if somethingsomething jump to frame 20, else loop back to frame one) this added a dimension of control and interactivity. Crucially, it was implemented well and very simple to understand.
- Everything was nested. MovieClips within MovieClips. Timelines within timelines. Simple behaviours could be stacked up and lead to natural-feeling complexity just due to this nesting.
Of course these things can be implemented today too, and other tools have and do implement versions of them. But there are often just 1 or 2 levels of abstraction too much, enough to put off some kinds of minds, or people at certain levels of experience. The thing about the Flash experience was that it all felt so fluid and intuitive. Direct. Learning it was fun.
Animate (as far as I remember) did keep those paradigms I mentioned. The timelines were still there, the drawing/animation tools too. But something somehow goes wrong in the translation to modern web tech. If it didn't, people would have just carried on using Flash, outputting JS/HTML instead of SWFs and nobody would have noticed.
A lot of the above is testament to Macromedia and linked to their other software, Director (similar to Flash but aimed more at desktop and 'interactive CDs'). They made software that was a joy to use. To give them their dues, Adobe pushed it further. Also their market dominance meant if you wanted to get into this web stuff and make cool things, Flash was *the* (only, really) way to do it. Which makes me think it may have been a time and place thing, which we won't get back. The modern web and range of options maybe makes it too diffuse, harder for something new to catch on. I hope I'm wrong.
As others have said here though, maybe stuff like MineCraft and Roblox are filling a similar conceptual gap for different generations and I'm just old and nostalgic.
Flash was an onramp to UX engineering in a way that no current tool compares to.
You would start out drawing, get tired of the repetitive parts, and learn to automate them. Eventually, you end up with an FLA file that's just an asset library and a reference to a script.
Plus, it had the most intuitive vector editor I've ever used.
> Code was inside MovieClips (in Flash [almost] everything was a MovieClip, basically a timeline of frames). Code was attached to frames.
It will be interesting to see if this project ends up working more like AS2 or AS3. AS2 gamedev was a real mess, but it sure was great for the simplest things.
I basically use a spec driven approach except I only let Github Spec Kit create the initial md file templates and then fill them myself instead of letting the agent do it. Saves a ton of tokens and is reasonably quick and I actually know I wrote the specs myself and it contains what I want. After I'm happy with the md file "harness" I let the agents loose.
The most frustrating issues that pop up are usually library/API conflicts. I work with Gymnasium or PettingZoo and Rlib or stablebaselines3. The APIs are constantly out of sync so it helps to have a working environment were libraries and APIs are in sync beforehand.
XFCE is also my go to. But I have moved on from caring too much about desktop environments as long as they don't get in the way. I went through a phase of trying pure openbox and all kinds of things and settled on XFCE. It doesn't do everything like I want but that's fine. I mostly open a terminal, a browser, thunderbird, some programming environment and a latex editor these days.
Agree. Anyone with access to large proprietary data has an edge in their space (not necessarily for foundation models): Salesforce, adobe, AutoCAD, caterpillar
I'm pretty sure it works very differently for different people so you have to figure out your own process. I've tried different things but at the end of the day, I simply have a notebook next to my laptop/in my laptop bag and write down everything in freeform text. No index, no bullet points and things like that. I put a date and start writing. I'll usually do some TODOs as checklists to get them out of my brain and bothering me at the start of the day but only big items, not each and every step. It's a mix of work and private things. Just writing stuff down is helpful for me, even if I never reference it again.
I do use the Feynman Technique if I come across something interesting and try to explain it on paper. So if I was using it just for work, I'd probably do that. Something like "Spec driven development (Github Spec Kit and similar toolkits) is essentially a bunch of md files that provide more context for agents. There are some scripts that provide scaffolding, having agents write the md uses a lot of tokens so writing them manually after the scaffold is generated makes more sense. Try with a small project."
A+ app, I turned on sound and was not disappointed.
Love the movie, got a spray can and sprayed my whole keyboard army green after watching it then realized I can't 10 finger type. What a golden age of interesting young people in computer security. Roughly one year later (iirc), I read "Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit" which might have been my most influential IT related read. It's probably tied with "Man-Computer Symbiosis" :)
I'd actually say the opposite is the case. B2B (even SaaS) is probably the most robust when it comes to AI resistance. The described "in house vibe coded SaaS replacement" does not mirror my experience in B2B at all. The B2B software mindset I've encountered the most is "We'll pay you so we don't have to wrestle with this and can focus on what we do. We'll pay you even more if we worry even less." which is basically the opposite of...let's have someone inhouse vibe code and push to production. B2B is usually fairly conservative.
There was no chance that everyone would be running their own email server, but if it wasn't for the lack of IPv6 adaptation a plug and go home email server solution would probably see a decent amount of use. I'd bet we'd already be seeing it as a feature in most mid-ranged home routers by now.
The mail server in a router is easy to host, the problem is:
1) Uptime (though this could be partially alleviated by retries)
and most of all:
2) "Trust"/"Spam score"
It's the main reason to use Sendgrid, AWS, Google, etc. Their "value" is not the email service, it's that their SMTP servers are trusted.
If tomorrow I can just send from localhost instead of going through Google it's fine for me, but in reality, my emails won't arrive due to these filters.
I use a small local provider (posteo) and have 0 problems with spam.
So a 20 pound monkey can also throw around some weight. To be fair I only use it for personal stuff its probably different if you need enterprise scale l.
I've seen plenty of Gmail accounts over the years and they pretty much look the same.
The only Gmail accounts that are "overrun by spam" are those of people subscribing to lots of spammy newsletters and then not knowing how to unsubscribe from them (or figuring they'd stay subscribed in case the next newsletter is the Magical One™). But that's 100% self inflicted and you can't save those people with any technical solution.
Email spam isn't a day to day problem for Gmail (at least) since Bayesian email filtering was first implemented.
The specific concern around uptime & reliability was baked into email systems from almost the start - undeliverable notifications (for the sender) and retries.
But yes, the “trust / spam score” is a legit challenge. If only device manufacturers were held liable for security flaws, but we sadly don’t live in that timeline.
Its not a device/MTA issue, SMTP just is not a secure protocol and there is not much you can do in order to 'secure' human communication. Things like spoofing or social engineering are near impossible to address within SMTP without external systems doing some sort of analysis on the messages or in combination with other protocols like DNS.
SMTP isn't at fault, the social ecosystem is at fault. Every system where identities are cheap has a spam problem. If you think a system has cheap identities and no spam, it probably doesn't have cheap identities — examples are HN or Reddit.
Trust / spam score is the largest one I think, second to consumer ISPs blocking the necessary ports for receiving mail.
Even if your "self hosting" is renting a $5/month VPS, some spam lists (e.g. UCEPROTECT) proactively mark any IP ranges owned by consumer ISPs and VPS hosting as potential spam. I figured paying fastmail $30/yr was worth never having to worry about it.
For "Trust", I believe patio11 described this system as the "Taxi Medallion of Email".
e.g. you spend a lot of money to show that you are a legitimate entity or you pay less money to rent something that shows you are connected to said entity.
Without some kind of federation or centralization, it seems hard to distinguish a hobbyist from a spammer if both of them are using a plug-and-go. Forcing that responsibility into the hands of Google, Zoho, and Microsoft seems like the best compromise, unfortunately.
For one, if my power goes out for an extended period of time I'd still like to be able to access my email. Communications really can't be hosted locally.
What a weird take. I was running my own email server 25 years ago on a 512 kbit ADSL line. No problem at all, would even be enough bandwidth today for most messages.
(Back then email still worked from residential IP addresses, and wasn't blocked by default)
I agree with you. In B2B SaaS you don't sell the software, you sell your expertise in a specific domain and the responsability you take for owning that expertise. The fact that the development costs are nearly zero will make them more valuable and more protifable
My experience is that SMBs are generally not run by people who feel confident doing any kind of self managed IT.
No amount of LLM usage is going to change them into full stack vibe coders who moonlight as sysadmins. I just don't see it happening.
Not until, that is, a new generation, that has grown accustomed to the tech, takes over.
Until then the current SMBs will for the most part fulfill their IT needs from SaaS businesses (of which I think there will be more due to LLMs lowering the barrier for those of us who feel confident in our coding and sysadmin skills already).
Having seen how clueless the new generation is and the amount of brain rot they get from using LLMs over honing their own skills, I'd say it's the opposite...
I'm considering SaaS replacements with in house code in situations where my general thoughts are "how can this possibly be the pricing for this?" which is not uncommon.
Well before vibe coding, tons of open source software existed (and exists) to replace SaaS. With lots of features and knobs and real communities. But I still often pay for SaaS because managing it is a headache. Some human has to do it. I can pay the human or I can pay the company. I really don’t see how vibe coded toys can replace real battle tested SaaS products. A better explanation is the bubble in PE ratio is deflating and it’s happening all over, regressing to the mean. AI is a convenient explanation for everything
How many SaaS companies are public? How is that bubble deflating?
These are real risks to these companies.
Your in-house teams can build replacements, it's just a matter of headcount. With Claude, you can build it and staff it and have time left over. Then your investment pays dividends instead of being a subscription straight jacket you have to keep renting.
I think there's an even faster middle ground: open source AI-assisted replacements for SaaS are probably coming. Some of these companies might offer managed versions, which will speed up adoption.
> Your in-house teams can build replacements, it's just a matter of headcount. With Claude, you can build it and staff it and have time left over. Then your investment pays dividends instead of being a subscription straight jacket you have to keep renting.
Lets take Figma as an example, Imagine you have 1000 employees, 300 of them need Figma, so you are paying 120k per year in Figma licenses. You can afford 1 employee working on your own internal Figma. you are paying the same but getting 100x worst experience, unless your 1 employee with CC can somehow find and copy important parts of Figma on his own, deploy and keep it running through the year without issues, which sounds ludicrous.
If you have less than 1000 employees it wouldnt even make sense to have 1 employee doing Figma
>Lets take Figma as an example, Imagine you have 1000 employees, 300 of them need Figma, so you are paying 120k per year in Figma licenses.
I mean in an example that almost happened... "you are paying 120k per year in Figma licenses, Adobe buys it, you are paying 500k per year in Figma licenses"
At least up until the point of vibe coding it was still worth the SaaS provider charging at least as much if not slightly more than you doing it yourself because most businesses weren't going to anyway.
By that logic, people should never use any Saas products because someday the price will increase. Then why even use Claude Code, someday they will get sick of losing money and increase the price to $1000/month.
> you just put your employees directly on Nano Banana or one of the simple Nano Banana wrappers.
So you end up spending the money elsewhere? with exploratory design you can easily spend 10k a month on these models as a company of 1000, thus completely losing any monetary savings. Anyway you look at it, Saas worked because costs were spread out and low enough to not optimize it too much.
Now you have an entire in-house product to manage and build features on. It could potentially work but so much of what my company pays for is about much more than the software itself. One example would be BrowserStack for very specific browser and mobile app testing edge cases. Can’t vibe code this. Another would be a VPN service with the maximum number of locations to test how our system behaves when accessing from those locations. Another would be hosted git. Another is google suite and all of its apps. How can we vibe code Google Docs and Sheets and Drive and all of the integrations and tooling? It simply isn’t going to happen.
Maybe you are right and the companies do want to pay and not worry about these problems. But now they have a lot more SaaS options to chose from. The incumbent companies like Salesforce and Atlassian have less of a moat. Maybe they'll keep the power users but if a customer is only using 80% of the feature set there is new competition.
Competition might come in the form of a startup but it can also come from existing SaaS companies expanding into adjacent domains. Canva now does docs. Notion does email. etc
Also, it is my experience that exec and boards favour safe and well known B2B partners over in house. It's a more publicly defensible approach that gives them an out if things go wrong and shareholders get upset.
For big corporations at least prices of SaaS are rarely an issue. Issues are: we don’t have the time to introduce a new tool, what about our processes, we don’t have the right people.
> 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.)
TailwindUI isn't really what I'd consider SaaS -- it was a buy once and download software product.
That means to keep making money they need keep selling new people. According to them, their only marketing channel was the Tailwind docs, AI made it so not nearly as many people needed to visit the tailwind docs.
If they had gone with the subscription SaaS model, they'd probably be a little better off, as they would have still had revenue coming in from their existing users.
> I mean if we want recent examples just look at tailwindui since it's technically a SaaS.
How is it in any way B2B? At most B2C + freelancers / individuals / really small SME.
It didn't have any clues a med/large B2B would look for e.g. SSO, SOC2 and other security measures. It doesn't target reusability that I as a B would want. The provided blocks never work together. There aren't reusable components.
Tailwind UI or now Tailwind Plus is more like vibe coding pre-AI.
Sorry but tailwindui is not a SAAS. There is no service or hosting. You buy a coded template once and then receive updates. It is totally not the same as a critical B2B SAAS that is running 24-7 on the vendor's servers providing real support and service.
TailwindUI unfortunately sits in a position of being an easy to disrupt business with current AI.
Now attempt the same with Zoom, I suspect vibe coding will fall down on a project that complex to fit the mental model of a single engineer maintained a widely used tool
Perhaps the case for premium CSS SaaS businesses, I guess (which seems particularly primed for disruption even pre-AI), but there are many more robust B2B categories out there that aren't literal code + docs as a service.
how dont people understand? if you have a VC funded b2b saas, you need to charge huge margins for the investors to get a return. now, small teams can vibe code a replacement and charge 90% less money. AI is going to kill saas margins.
i literally cannot understand why people keep repeating that non tech companies will build their own software, thats not the bear case for saas
Did vanilla Jira for a while, battled with a web app that is actively trying to make you hate it—switched our team to Linear, couldn't be happier ever since.
Well for marketing and sales your bigger competitor is already doing the work of showing companies that they want the functionality at all, and the cheaper competitor's sales and marketing pitch can be: we are much cheaper.
This is pretty much what blacksmith.sh does -- GitHub Actions but it's on faster and cheaper hardware. I'm sure they spend non-trivial amounts on marketing but "X but much cheaper" doesn't sound like a difficult sale.
(edit) And the design, sadly, can be as simple as "rip-off bigger competitor" -- of course if one day you are the big competitor because you "won" in the market, you'll need to invest in design, but by then I guess you'll have the money?
they dont, which is why these companies are going to get smoked. a small team of people will compete with atlassian head on. the whole saas business model is under threat
Yeah.... The code isn't the hard part. That's not where the value is.
This hard part when you're doing in house stuff is getting a good spec, ongoing support, and long term maintenance.
I've gone trough development of a module with a stakeholder, got a whole spec, confirmed it, coded it, launched it, and was then told it didn't work at all like what they needed. It was literally what they told me... I've said 'yes we can make that report, what specific fields do you need' and gotten blank stares.
Even if you're lucky and the original stakeholder and the code are on the same page, as soon as you get a coworkers 'wouldnt it be nice if...' you're going to have a bad day if it's hand coded, vibecoded, or outsourced...
This has always been the problem, it's why no-code never _really_ worked, even if the tech was perfectly functional.
The accounting saas dores presumably uses doesn't "automate spreadsheets" as its core value prop.
related: i'm thinking these vibe coded solutions are revealing to everyone how important and under appreciated good UX is when it comes to implicit education of any given thing. Like given this complex process, the UX is holding your hand while educating you through a workflow. this stuff is part of software engineering yet it isn't "code".
I, on the other hand, can't wait to fire every single B2B subscription we've got.
B2B SaaS is a VULN. They get bought out, raise prices, fail. And then you have extremely large amounts of unplanned spend and engineering to get around them.
I remember when we replaced the feature flags and metrics dashboards with SignalFX and LaunchDarkly. Both of those went sour. SignalFx got bought out and quadrupled their insane prices. LaunchDarkly promised the moon, but their product worked worse than our in-house system and we spent nearly a year with a couple of dedicated headcount engineering workarounds.
Atlassian, you name it - it's all got to go.
I just wish I could include AWS in this list. Compute and infra needs to be as generic as water.
If you're working at SaaS, find an exit. AI is coming for you. Now's a great time to work on the AI replacement of your product.
> And then you have extremely large amounts of unplanned spend and engineering to get around them.
I have no idea how you are spending "large amounts" of unplanned spend on Saas products. Every company I worked for had Saas subscription costs being under 1% of capex. Unless you add AWS, which is actually "large amounts" but good luck vibe coding that.
Metrics at a fintech processing billions of dollars of daily GPV, plus the signals from every microservice in the constellation are enormous. Huge scale time series data.
We had an in-house system that worked, but it was a two pizza team split between time series and logging. "Internal weirdware" got thrown around a lot, so we outsourced to SignalFx for a few years. It was bumpy. I liked our in-house system better, and I didn't build it.
Splunk then buys SignalFx and immediately multiplies the pricing at a conveniently timed contract renewal. Suddenly every team in the company has to plan an emergency migration.
What agents are you using? If you stick to opentelemetry and open source agents and develop a collector infrastructure -
You can switch across different vendors with lower impact and ramp off time.
Your supply chain is messed up. You need sign longer contracts with price guarantees.
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