Did you claim the same a year or two ago? Why or why not?

It was always relatively easy to copy many SaaS services, especially bootstrapped ones. Unless everybody wants to make and run their service locally, very little changes.

But what about their two year head start? If everyone is executing at the speed of light, there will still be winners and losers

Yes friend. That's what people said 2 years ago. Next?

There's been an obvious step change on the coding front from 2 years ago, and it feels obvious to me there's going to be another. The difference now is the people working on systems to clone SaaS at scale are likely starting to put real effort, sustained effort into now that agents are good enough to accomplish subsets of it, can be improved much further with the right techniques and orchestration, and themselves will get better over the next two years along with all the improvements and build up of tooling. Right now feels like one of those "skate to where the puck is going to be" moments in time.

Personally, hard disagree. There were improvements, yes, but the last year felt particularly stagnant to me

I've found assigning issues to GitHub Copilot on GitHub itself to be a real step-wise change from one off requests to a chat based interface that has no awareness of my codebase. Maybe it's just me, but I'm getting significantly more realworld value out of AI these days. I've been working through doing an implementation of a spec using GitHub Copilot mostly from my phone, and it has been a really instructive exercise in how to squeeze as much out such a narrow interface as possible. I still dip into a full desktop + IDE from time to time, but for like 90% of it I've been doing it in my phone. Slowly but surely working my way from "vibe coded in a weekend" level initial AI slop quality to nice, clean architecture, excellent dev tooling, production grade multitenant SaaS. I've still got a ways to go, but I'm able to make quite a lot of progress just using my phone during my commute, on my lunch breaks, in between meetings, and bathroom breaks etc.

And? How easy will it be to iterate the product and build features and a user experience as it is used in the wild? How easy will it be to find customers willing to pay you money for it?

Doesn’t have to be a commercial solution to change the game. There’s a lot of room between the commercial product and ‘Our end users… current "system" is Excel.’ Especially if the market moves towards making useful APIs at the ERP and vendors endpoints.

And how would the outcome be different after a couple of years than the internally built Excel file with VBScript, Access and VB6 apps built by non developers back in the day?