I hope there's some forced migration of the SaaS business model towards primarily being "just an API" for whatever magic sauce it is they have. Too much of SaaS moats are just locking the backend behind an undocumented API.
Users should be able to have full control over their experience interacting with third parties if they want it. This isn't unique to post-LLM stacks like this, but it seems like this shifts the balance of power.
The next step after injecting custom UI controls is to build completely alternative frontends. The next step after that should be to build generic local frontends that abstract over multiple comparable thirdparty providers.
First, is a 500 because you are using the API in a way that is unexpected a customer found defect? If Claude can't find the answer, what is the expectation of support?
If an internal team makes a change that breaks your workflow (because it was an unexpected use case), is that a CFD?
Do teams slow down in new features because the API must be the stress test of a public api?
I'm fine with unsupported frontends but an external API will be very difficult to keep static.
The last company I worked for before going into consulting full time was a startup where I was the then new CTOs first technical hire. The company before then outsourced the actual technical work to a third party consulting company until they found product market fit.
His primary mandate was API and micro service first.
Our customers were large health care systems.
We had a customer facing website that was built on top of the same APIs that we sold our customers.
Our customers paid for the features they wanted and those features were available on our website, they were used for their website and mobile apps and the ETL process was either via a file they sent us and we ran through the same APIs or they could use our APIs directly for both online and batch processes.
This is no different from the API mandate Bezos made at Amazon back in 2000.
You don’t have to keep an API static - that’s what versioning is for.
I think the talking point is maintaining a well versioned and solid API as product is way harder than shipping a few screens that can change whenever you need them to. (behind those screens being a bunch of duct tape to a clusterF of internal APIs). no guarantees.
what you're saying is that you were at a company that did that hard thing of shipping APIs as product.
Nice vision, "alternative frontends" is something really useful for horizontal SaaS. We do this for over 2000 customers, from field workers to CEOs of public companies, and it's so satisfying to hear the great feedback when they tell me that they finally have software perfectly adapted to their workflows.
If attention-span was shot with social-media, it has no chance in the age of AI. All these deep tech-tools potentially have tons of value, but if it doesn't make sense in 5 seconds, very hard to compete.
I think the right step would be to somehow communicate to the vendor that this feature is needed (eliminating the PM backlog BS) and their coding Agents should pick it and build it. The real moat they have is SaaS vendors have everyone believe that trivial feature requests take time to implement.
There is an entire industry of Salesforce, Workday, ServiceNow consultants and almost any other major SaaS app that you can hire to customize the app based on public APIs. I can’t imagine choosing any mission critical SaaS app without publicly documented APIs
That introduces a level of indirection between "what I want" and what gets built. A workflow like the OP just has less friction. SaaS platforms would want to provide more stable accessible APIs if it becomes a popular model, because users would find it more usable.
these embeddable UI could be a direct ask on how users want a workflow, the SaaS vendors can distribute the embeddable UI and see if it clicks with a lot of users. Would push them to create a stable API
> have everyone believe that trivial feature requests take time to implement.
This could not be more wrong. Features do, because telling a user they can do X comes with a standing promise that it works, the results are correct, the ui is accessible, the feature cleanly interacts with all other features in the system (both now and in the future), corner cases are worked out, etc. And that burden is where prod+eng spend time.
Surprised this is your take coming from a UX designer. You think a straight path for every user to add their feature ideas results in a good UX?
edit: reading further into this, the idea is perhaps that users vibe-code their own distinct UX with everything valuable to them. That's not a bad take, but even in that world, I wouldn't think UX and product disciplines become exposed for having no value at all.
My take in this (ironic) comment was just "no feature is free", which I don't think should be odd coming from a UX designer!
> the idea is perhaps that users vibe-code their own distinct UX with everything valuable to them
I do find this interesting. I work on a complex business operations and reporting platform and every facility has their own lil quirks. More control in their hands would let them smooth out their workflows while still relying on the foundational work our platform does.
Ah, I didn't register the sarcasm. Typical HN, it's probably why you're downvoted.
Yes, today's HN session has me nerd-sniped about what the future of product development looks like. I've been thinking how mock-to-prototype is just too slow when engineers can ship so much so fast. Eng needs design direction especially when it's too easy to "solve design" with tailwind components and "You're a designer from a top saas company" prompts.
But what if the new UX is less visual-first and more IA, primitives and well structured object models... now that has me thinking.
Totally, that's the entire conjecture of this bot. My point is just that the odds of the underlying events are irrelevant, what matters is if they're matched with the betting price
It is not the entire conjecture of this bot. The dev claimed a percentage of bets that win with “no” and wrote some code to fuck around.
You though, are claiming that the market is perfectly priced, or should be, such that this strategy won’t work. It’s pretty hard to balance the odds of an animal seeing their shadow vs the expected strike price of the nasdaq. It’s clear you’re not familiar with betting markets, which is in your best interest most likely, but that’s not how this works.
You’re arguing against yourself… against a point nobody made but you.
But then think about what the routing tables would look like, how would an IPv4-only host find an IPv6 host not in pool 0? You'd be reinventing NAT, but in a less-structured context than how NAT works today. There's more issues to it too.
If it was really that simple they would have done exactly that. "Just adding more bits to IPv4" just isn't possible to do backwards-compatibly. IPv6 is the closest you can get to that while also dealing with the complexity that arises with longer addresses.
Because of Oracle v Google, supporting applications running in the Win32 userspace isn't necessarily leaving yourself open to threats of Microsoft meddling.
There's tons and tons of older software that people still want to run that might never be ported to Linux. And that's fine, because there's no problem with building compatibility layers to make it work. Microsoft can't do anything about that.
Of course, in this case the issue seems like it's caused by a general deficiency of single protein, maybe that's a good sign for adapting the treatment to humans.
Yes. Not a drug in the typical sense. Simply replacing the protein in which the mice are deficient (that was identified by measuring levels in human spinal fluid).
I think this started when "web3" cryptocurrency projects started using the term to pretend that something which isn't much more than a service that uses a blockchain network to move money around was actually somehow "decentralized" and that that made it more trustworthy.
Users should be able to have full control over their experience interacting with third parties if they want it. This isn't unique to post-LLM stacks like this, but it seems like this shifts the balance of power.
The next step after injecting custom UI controls is to build completely alternative frontends. The next step after that should be to build generic local frontends that abstract over multiple comparable thirdparty providers.
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