Saas Is Dead. Long Live… SaaS? (Sanity as a Service)
According to some, agentic programming spelled the end of SaaS, while simultaneously producing more fast-food style SaaS products with claims of tens of thousands of MRR through vibe-coded apps. We are living in an era where everything is possible and nothing makes sense anymore. All in all, it truly is pandemonium.
We owe this madness to the rise of agentic programming, in which you create a bunch of Markdown files and type what you want into a chat box. Et voila, byte-sized oompa-loompas in your computer get to work on delivering you all your wildest dreams. But as in all fairy tales, be careful what you wish for lest you get burned by that which you want the most. At least this is usually the message of such tales, but we humans never learn do we?
But I digress. This post is not about the horrors of agentic solutions, but for once about a boon of them.
Insane productivity claims have ever been part of tech culture. For as long as I have been writing code, there has been a craze about the “next-best tool” that will “10x your (team’s) productivity”. I am willing to bet my house that this claim alone made more sales than any other pitch combined in history of humanity. This very claim gave us Scrum, Jira, Slack, Notion, Confluence, Zoom, Asana, Loom and a whole bunch of CI/CD solutions.
Some of these like CI/CD solutions genuinely reduce time to ship, increasing overall productivity of a team. While they are not without their flaws (*cough* Github Actions exploits *cough*), overall they have been a net positive.
Others though… Well let’s just say as devs we have been living in a productivity purgatory for a long time, long before agentic development madness. Countless hours of work have been lost to context switching. On average, it takes 23 minutes to re-focus after a significant disruption, all the while the average worker toggled between apps hundreds of times a day, and it seems even momentary disruptions can delay train of thought.
Any developer knows this. We have all experienced the white-hot rage at being interrupted by a trivial question or a slack message in the middle of deep-focus. Or at least this has been a daily experience for me for a long time. As a result, I hate Slack and Discord with the fiery passion of a thousand suns. The notification chime of Slack is akin to a banshee scream to me, my whole body tenses.
So I muted them. I muted them all.
Which left me with a problem. I still need to be able to communicate with my team. I need to be able to go through the Github Issues, Jira Tickets, Featurebase tickets and respond to user questions, preferably in a timely manner because I like to remain employed. A conundrum indeed. I have a severe physical reaction to channels in which I have to interact with people, and yet I need to use the said channel.
An unexpected agent of chaos came to my rescue: Agentic programming. One particularly bleak day of my existence, I realized we have been neglecting a customer facing communication channel, and someone needed to respond to the messages. Lo and behold, the messages were in my purview. You can imagine my dismay.
As someone with ADHD, I typically do not have any problem doing stuff, as long as I can start the said stuff. And my incredible aversion to opening messages (including emails) is a big blocker to getting the work done. When I say aversion, I mean a physical resistance from my body. It is inexplicable and very very frustrating. In any case, on that bleak day, I decided to outsource the task initiation to my oompa-loompas. I built agents to do my intake for me.
I started with my email. Then Jira. Then Github Issues. Then my calendar. Then Slack. Then Airflow for good measure to see if any of our pipelines have failed. All of a sudden I had a personal assistant who would review all my channels for me summarize the reported issues, group them together, link them to existing tickets, analyze the responses from our upstream providers for tickets we have raised to see if we can close any downstream issues. Work with me to prioritize my backlog. It was incredible. And I haven’t left my terminal ever since.
The peace of mind. The sanity. Truly a blessing.
I see a million posts talking about lines of code written by agents, how much of the job is outsourced to our doom-bringer oompa-loompas. Sure that’s great, but coding has never really been my blocker, I could always ship fast as long as I could start writing the code. The biggest blocker has always been scoping, making decisions on which trade-offs we will accept, clarifying our opinions or whether we would impose any opinions on our end-product, testing the code, assisting client migrations to any new features from potentially deprecated ones. You know, the planning and the logistics of developing software has always been the thing that takes the longest.
And these things still are the biggest time-sinks. But you know what improved my productivity? Not having to context switch every 10 minutes because someone is “pinging” me. My oompa-loompa handles that now while I actually do the work. And you know what? Our deliverables have never been faster and better.