As niche SaaS provider, I'm trying to avoid succumbing to the same fate. The product I built carefully for years would now be within the reach of a senior dev with a couple focused weeks -- if they knew all the requirements. To avoid being overtaken, I'm working to increase my customer's requirements -- getting them hooked on new reports and features I never had time to build before LLMs could do it for me. This makes it less likely for a competitor to be able to afford to quickly replace me.
replyAt the same time, I have no idea what the cost of LLMs usage will be in the future. So I'm working to ensure the architecture stays clean and maintainable for humans in case this kind of tooling becomes untenable.
That sounds like a good strategy to me. We have a couple other products we're looking to knock out to reduce costs, and the decision comes down to me and another colleague. The thing these businesses have in common - difficult to partner with, rough edges for the use cases we need, and no appetite on their end to shore them up. We're paying premium prices for a subpar experience. If instead they adopted your thinking, perhaps we would've looked for savings elsewhere.
replyI've found in the embedded space that people sell lots and lots of products that do everything you could ever want, and the most efficient thing to do is not buy those things and instead find a way to do just the subset of things you care about with your own back-end systems. The upshot of that is that because you're in total control if something goes wrong you can fix it without getting 6 people on a phone call to point fingers at each other.
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