Max Musing

For as long as software has existed, the user has been a person. Someone sitting at a desk, poking at a phone, or calling an API. That assumption was so obvious it was never really a design principle, it was just common sense. Every decision about hierarchy, color, button placement, and error messaging was downstream of a single fact: a human being is going to see this.

With agents, that assumption is starting to fail.

Last year we hired a design agency to build our marketing site for @Basedash. They did an incredible job. The headline makes it sound like I'm dunking on them, but I'm not. The site was genuinely great. They built it in Framer so we could manage content ourselves, which was a completely reasonable bet at the time (and something we explicitly asked for).

There's a popular narrative on social media right now that AI can build software so quickly and cheaply that SaaS is dead (or will be soon).

Why pay for Linear when AI can build a project tracker in an afternoon? Why pay Stripe $30k/year when you can vibe code your own billing system in a weekend? The cost of building software has collapsed to near zero, therefore the value of selling software has collapsed to near zero. QED, SaaS is dead.