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The 90s thought exercise

I see a lot of "will this SaaS be around in a few years?", and I've been doing a thought exercise to get clearer on what software will get replaced.

Imagine that in the 90s we already had LLMs writing all the code for us. How much software would companies just write themselves, like CRMs and analytics? If LLM chat was already the main user interface, what consumer products would still make sense? And given companies are already doing most of this themselves, what SaaS companies would make sense to build, and what would they look like?

For example:

  • Does Canva make sense? Certainly not in its current form. I reckon usage is still high out of habit.
  • Does Gmail make sense? Probably as a headless version, with no app of its own. The cloud storage and identity pieces are still useful.