Regarding "entities", totally understand. I like to write in ways that my mom would understand- not the HN community. In fact, I have a post called "Everything is a Spreadsheet", where I explicitly defined that Entity<->Noun relationship. Should have linked it!
Back to the Saaspocalypse... my startup is reckoning with this like all others. My next blog post will be titled "What's Preventing Me from Building Your App in a Weekend?". The ultimate "what's your moat" question. I think every SaaS should be forced to answer this on their marketing site. Thinking aloud, I'm considering good answers companies can say to this question... I think a perfectly legitimate answer is still "our prompts are better than your prompts". There are some companies where I simply believe the founders/engineers when they say they understand the problem better than I, because they've explored it more deeply. This is kinda what I was hinting at at the end... softwares that go mega-vertical in one or two nouns accrue more subject matter expertise than I ever will. Thus, that gives me more reason to trust their infrastructure, their configurations, and their prompts. This is not new but rather an extension of what created the SaaS economy in the first place.
I will definitely check out your profile- thank you for the thoughtful reply!
On the other hand, much of the code I write is in an industry where training and operations manuals are closely guarded corporate secrets that make up the recipe or soul of a company. The job of the SWE is to deeply understand the processes and procedures that employees follow, and to write code that helps facilitate those and then gets out of the way. A lot of it comes from walking around and seeing how people are actually using the software and what works, and what's a pain point. I've always maintained that the value is in the operations manuals, and the code is just a logical extension of that. But that's where SaaS usually is insufficient because regardless how versatile and broad it is, it doesn't usually encapsulate enough domain knowledge, let alone the proprietary stuff.
One effective moat might be "Your LLM has never been trained on our closed source codebase."