Like many of us, I've been hobbying away on some SaaS that wraps an LLM. But I often worry, isn't this just adding buttons to an LLM call? What's the real value here? Quick money grab and wait for copies? Or do my 20 years of saas and business development actually make my SaaS better then others?
Even if I could answer your question (which I can't), things change so fast right now that it might not be valid for long. All you can do is be willing to rapidly adapt and stay focused on where your product adds value.
I believe it completely depends on your values and perspective, as a poor analogy: when mobile apps were a novelty a bunch of them were just that, novelties, the beer drinking app, the flicking a Zippo-esque app, and many more that hadn't much functionality, were more a tech demo, cool toys, etc.
If you don't care so much about adding something significant to the world, and your LLM-buttons-wrapper is a novelty, chug along and see where it goes if you're having fun. Looking for what value mean at this moment is a much harder effort, and probably a luck-based endeavour.
I don't have fun creating LLM-wrappers or at least haven't thought of a fun idea for it that could be even a fun novelty to work on so personally I'm not doing it but I'm using LLMs for other fun stuff that required much more of my free time before.
Many of us have the exact same thought process. Related: I have heard indie game developers have stopped the traditional practice of updating a dev log as a form of marketing and community building because people will point their LLm at it and create your own game before you do
I have some strong feelings about this particular story (people point LLMs at your devlog)…
- Video devlogs were long a shitty way to make a community (I can explain this one in more detail, but in short, the tradeoff between opportunity cost and video quality is a Pareto curve that is bad at all points on the curve, if your goals include both “make game” and “build community for players with devlogs”, the way out is to drop one of those two requirements, either “make YouTube/Twitch/TikTok channel” replaces “make game”, or you build some other audience for your devlogs)
- Good devlogs don’t have that level of detail, to let people easily recreate games
- Most games can’t easily be replicated by LLMs, in short, the people who are good at steering LLMs like that are making their own games.
This is not the first time I heard this story. Sometimes it comes with the lamentation “back in the day people could build communities with devlogs” and no, that was generally not a good way to build communities. It was mostly good streams from YouTubers who were making the game in order to make YouTube content or it was mediocre streams from random devs. Throw in a few people who are famous game devs who choose to stream and get a big audience because they already have a community.
From what I’ve seen, most of the flood of LLM-created games aren’t profitable, just like most of the games people make in devlogs. There’s very little thunder to be stolen in the first place.
indie game developers have stopped the traditional practice of updating a dev log as a form of marketing and community building because people will point their LLm at it and create your own game before you do
And that's why we can't have good things...
(This is just gonna keep happening more and more until eventually we'll need something like a patent system for ideas)
You'd be surprised how much money companies throw at very simple products, I'm working for a company making 100k mrr and was virtually entirely vibe coded by one dev until very recently
I don't think "is my SaaS better than others" is the important question, instead "is SaaS going to be valuable in a cheap bespoke software future".
I've been playing with an LLM backed reference checker for my partner who is a lecturer. For each reference in some work she's marking an agent is dispatched to read the referenced source and check that the reference is correct / accurate / not hallucinated.
It's useful to her, but it feels like it would be a waste of effort to turn into a product, because pasting the same document into Claude/ChatGPT with a prompt like "download and read each reference etc" would work pretty much just as well.
I had similar concerns about an AI backed training generation company I interviewed with. I asked how they saw themselves competing with increasingly capable generic harnesses. I don't recall exactly what they said but the impression I got was they were so focused on competing with the big LMS players that they hadn't really considered it.
Typically maintenance, reliability, support and liability; nothing new in SaaS land. Lots of companies have the money to hand-roll things that are provided by some external SaaS but would much rather it was someone else’s problem.
Also for creatives, some sort of aesthetic control? Most of the examples on this page look like templates you’d see in an office suite that appear swish, but are ultimately bland.
I built https://gallotails.com/ because I am a cocktail enthusiast. First commit, March 6th 2019. One of the features I am proud is which cocktails you can build based on your ingredients, and I was smart, the bar ignores garnishes and can suggest cocktails you're one ingredient away. But you have to add the ingredients. And interpret the bar screen.
Clicked the microphone icon and rambled for a few seconds (could have just taken a picture too I guess). Nudged ChatGPT to only give me simple cocktails I can stir instead of using a mixer. Said I could buy a lime, sure. Then asked how to keep the ginger beer fresh.
There is NO WAY I can code all of that in my little gallotails.com - a single chat window has entirely replaced my site. And that's my pet little project I do it on weekends, mostly to keep my tech skills sharp. I can only imagine what the biggest cocktails website, actual companies, are going / will go through once more and more people just realize the chat tab is enough. And I am not talking about purely content, ChatGPT can do everything my site does, and more, into any direction, in an instant.
Which left me with the question, then what should my site be? Community? To be taken over by agents?
Currently munching on what sites like mine should do, and what they should be.
Then maybe the need for your site is gone. That’s a good thing in the sense that the problem is solved. If your goal is “do something in the cocktail space” (which is also roughly the companies’ goal I would say), indeed you should do what the AI can’t, which I’d say is be human touch. An AI can’t give your opinion or view.
I personally am more interested about personal opinions about things like cocktails rather than whatever statistically average cocktail the matrices of chatgpt come up with.
Chatgpt would shit on my great grandma's waffle recipe but it's the one I'll keep making till the day I die.
Here’s an easy proxy: Did you feel the need to build it because nothing to your liking existed? Did it take some effort to build? Do others feel the need to use your thing for those reasons?
Then it’s sufficiently non-obvious. I believe there’s still a pretty big field of things that fall into this category. Making proper things is a lot more than writing some code.
I don't want to be a hater but I made this a while ago and I honestly think the videos are a good bit nicer than what you are creating with Opus 5.5. https://mnfst.video/
This is just taking an existing presentation slides skill and generating a video out of it. There are no drawings and animations that explain the actual concepts.
These aren't even that good in comparison to the stuff being posted on Reddit and twitter/X.
Some of the stuff I've seen is mindblowingly impressive in how they've captured quality creative decisions, and how the models can reason about visually appealing designs.
It understands things like continuity, themes, facial expressions, cultural memes/references, symbolism, etc. And it generates things using a lot of multi-modal behavior by using 3d, images, etc.
Agreed. Just yesterday, I recreated the XKCD comic “A Bunch of Rocks” (https://xkcd.com/505/) as a video. It took me about five hours, using ElevenLabs for the audio and a step-by-step process involving brainstorming, planning, storyboarding, and so on. Opus 5.5 has become remarkably capable.
One important difference between animations/videos generated by Opus 5.5 and the stereotypical AI slop videos is that Opus 5.5 is not a video generation model: it generates and iterates the code and renders it, and there are various ways for it to do so.
I've been experimenting with AI video generation beyond raw video gen for some time now. Opus 4.5 was the first tool I tried last year, and it was okay...
Fast forward a few months, and Opus 5.5 is now running my entire video production pipeline. This model is leaps and bounds ahead of the previous model.
I can generate a complete 5-minute explainer video on my MacBook Air M4 in about five minutes from a single prompt, using the Gemini TTS API and MiniMax H3 Max for b-roll. It creates thumbnails and titles, handles the entire process, and automatically uploads the result via the YouTube API—all powered by a Claude Code plugin. (youtube.com/@ctrlaltexplain for those interested).
Jaw literally dropped. I ran the prompt from the "Made entirely with Opus 5.5" post on my own project. Here's what Claude Code made on its own for about $4.Claude Code Workflow
Recent models have been a big step up on graphics generation. Not exactly sure why, it would be neat if they would release any quantity of technical blogs.
What is the agent using to make those videos?
Wow, this is phenomenal. Thanks for sharing.
If you're the author congrats, great work!
Arguably, this type of content was already slop before the AI times, so nothing of value was lost.
Right. My first question when I see this type of video is asking for a text write up. What tool is used to create these videos doesn’t change that.
Can I just say "oh dear god no ..."
(not that they were great before, but ...)
Like many of us, I've been hobbying away on some SaaS that wraps an LLM. But I often worry, isn't this just adding buttons to an LLM call? What's the real value here? Quick money grab and wait for copies? Or do my 20 years of saas and business development actually make my SaaS better then others?
Even if I could answer your question (which I can't), things change so fast right now that it might not be valid for long. All you can do is be willing to rapidly adapt and stay focused on where your product adds value.
I believe it completely depends on your values and perspective, as a poor analogy: when mobile apps were a novelty a bunch of them were just that, novelties, the beer drinking app, the flicking a Zippo-esque app, and many more that hadn't much functionality, were more a tech demo, cool toys, etc.
If you don't care so much about adding something significant to the world, and your LLM-buttons-wrapper is a novelty, chug along and see where it goes if you're having fun. Looking for what value mean at this moment is a much harder effort, and probably a luck-based endeavour.
I don't have fun creating LLM-wrappers or at least haven't thought of a fun idea for it that could be even a fun novelty to work on so personally I'm not doing it but I'm using LLMs for other fun stuff that required much more of my free time before.
Many of us have the exact same thought process. Related: I have heard indie game developers have stopped the traditional practice of updating a dev log as a form of marketing and community building because people will point their LLm at it and create your own game before you do
I have some strong feelings about this particular story (people point LLMs at your devlog)…
- Video devlogs were long a shitty way to make a community (I can explain this one in more detail, but in short, the tradeoff between opportunity cost and video quality is a Pareto curve that is bad at all points on the curve, if your goals include both “make game” and “build community for players with devlogs”, the way out is to drop one of those two requirements, either “make YouTube/Twitch/TikTok channel” replaces “make game”, or you build some other audience for your devlogs)
- Good devlogs don’t have that level of detail, to let people easily recreate games
- Most games can’t easily be replicated by LLMs, in short, the people who are good at steering LLMs like that are making their own games.
This is not the first time I heard this story. Sometimes it comes with the lamentation “back in the day people could build communities with devlogs” and no, that was generally not a good way to build communities. It was mostly good streams from YouTubers who were making the game in order to make YouTube content or it was mediocre streams from random devs. Throw in a few people who are famous game devs who choose to stream and get a big audience because they already have a community.
The whole problem with LLMs is that you don't need the detail.
Ok, so let’s get some data points. Are there games being recreated from devlogs? I’d like to see what the recreations look like.
An LLM "recreation" doesn't have to be complete or very good. It just has to steal enough thunder to be profitable.
From what I’ve seen, most of the flood of LLM-created games aren’t profitable, just like most of the games people make in devlogs. There’s very little thunder to be stolen in the first place.
And that's why we can't have good things...
(This is just gonna keep happening more and more until eventually we'll need something like a patent system for ideas)
So, a patent?
You could build something really useful, but if I can replicate 95% of that in a weekend with Claude I'm obviously not going to pay you for it.
Some SaaS products have network effects, but that doesn't appy to new software.
Starting a SaaS business in 2026 seems a bit silly to me. Not saying people won't make money, but you'd have to be pretty lucky.
You'd be surprised how much money companies throw at very simple products, I'm working for a company making 100k mrr and was virtually entirely vibe coded by one dev until very recently
It's not always a call that wraps an llm.
The LLM only does average returns from average inputs.
I don't think "is my SaaS better than others" is the important question, instead "is SaaS going to be valuable in a cheap bespoke software future".
I've been playing with an LLM backed reference checker for my partner who is a lecturer. For each reference in some work she's marking an agent is dispatched to read the referenced source and check that the reference is correct / accurate / not hallucinated.
It's useful to her, but it feels like it would be a waste of effort to turn into a product, because pasting the same document into Claude/ChatGPT with a prompt like "download and read each reference etc" would work pretty much just as well.
I had similar concerns about an AI backed training generation company I interviewed with. I asked how they saw themselves competing with increasingly capable generic harnesses. I don't recall exactly what they said but the impression I got was they were so focused on competing with the big LMS players that they hadn't really considered it.
this is why people have been suggesting an AI bubble, outside of the frontier model labs
Typically maintenance, reliability, support and liability; nothing new in SaaS land. Lots of companies have the money to hand-roll things that are provided by some external SaaS but would much rather it was someone else’s problem.
Also for creatives, some sort of aesthetic control? Most of the examples on this page look like templates you’d see in an office suite that appear swish, but are ultimately bland.
I've been struggling with that.
I built https://gallotails.com/ because I am a cocktail enthusiast. First commit, March 6th 2019. One of the features I am proud is which cocktails you can build based on your ingredients, and I was smart, the bar ignores garnishes and can suggest cocktails you're one ingredient away. But you have to add the ingredients. And interpret the bar screen.
And here's what I did with ChatGPT a few days ago: https://chatgpt.com/share/6ab59877-4b74-83e8-8da5-966d9f3a38...
Clicked the microphone icon and rambled for a few seconds (could have just taken a picture too I guess). Nudged ChatGPT to only give me simple cocktails I can stir instead of using a mixer. Said I could buy a lime, sure. Then asked how to keep the ginger beer fresh.
There is NO WAY I can code all of that in my little gallotails.com - a single chat window has entirely replaced my site. And that's my pet little project I do it on weekends, mostly to keep my tech skills sharp. I can only imagine what the biggest cocktails website, actual companies, are going / will go through once more and more people just realize the chat tab is enough. And I am not talking about purely content, ChatGPT can do everything my site does, and more, into any direction, in an instant.
Which left me with the question, then what should my site be? Community? To be taken over by agents?
Currently munching on what sites like mine should do, and what they should be.
Then maybe the need for your site is gone. That’s a good thing in the sense that the problem is solved. If your goal is “do something in the cocktail space” (which is also roughly the companies’ goal I would say), indeed you should do what the AI can’t, which I’d say is be human touch. An AI can’t give your opinion or view.
I personally am more interested about personal opinions about things like cocktails rather than whatever statistically average cocktail the matrices of chatgpt come up with.
Chatgpt would shit on my great grandma's waffle recipe but it's the one I'll keep making till the day I die.
Here’s an easy proxy: Did you feel the need to build it because nothing to your liking existed? Did it take some effort to build? Do others feel the need to use your thing for those reasons?
Then it’s sufficiently non-obvious. I believe there’s still a pretty big field of things that fall into this category. Making proper things is a lot more than writing some code.
I don't want to be a hater but I made this a while ago and I honestly think the videos are a good bit nicer than what you are creating with Opus 5.5. https://mnfst.video/
This is just taking an existing presentation slides skill and generating a video out of it. There are no drawings and animations that explain the actual concepts.
I wonder what the future is of SaaS in a world where everybody can vibe up what they need on demand.
Yeh try that. Not that simple at all, this is why servicenow and sales force are just killing it
Not sure if it is working for others, but if I point it at any of my domains I get "The model provider rejected the request".
These aren't even that good in comparison to the stuff being posted on Reddit and twitter/X.
Some of the stuff I've seen is mindblowingly impressive in how they've captured quality creative decisions, and how the models can reason about visually appealing designs.
It understands things like continuity, themes, facial expressions, cultural memes/references, symbolism, etc. And it generates things using a lot of multi-modal behavior by using 3d, images, etc.
Some really incredibly impressive stuff.
I won't open Twitter, but where on Reddit is this stuff posted?
Agreed. Just yesterday, I recreated the XKCD comic “A Bunch of Rocks” (https://xkcd.com/505/) as a video. It took me about five hours, using ElevenLabs for the audio and a step-by-step process involving brainstorming, planning, storyboarding, and so on. Opus 5.5 has become remarkably capable.
[0] https://simulationcorner.net/A_Bunch_of_Rocks.mp4
lol no it's not.
I asked it to make a site for my TI4 reference project: https://axiomvortix.com
It produced a video about an AI startup with the vague goal of centralizing data.
My friend..definition of “good” is very relative. These are just flashy slide decks
HN never fails to be disappointed.
One important difference between animations/videos generated by Opus 5.5 and the stereotypical AI slop videos is that Opus 5.5 is not a video generation model: it generates and iterates the code and renders it, and there are various ways for it to do so.
The code for the infamous "I'm upping my p(doom)" video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8j-hR4fJywU) is open-source and uses Processing: https://github.com/JohnHeibel/PDoomVideo
I've been experimenting with AI video generation beyond raw video gen for some time now. Opus 4.5 was the first tool I tried last year, and it was okay...
Fast forward a few months, and Opus 5.5 is now running my entire video production pipeline. This model is leaps and bounds ahead of the previous model.
I can generate a complete 5-minute explainer video on my MacBook Air M4 in about five minutes from a single prompt, using the Gemini TTS API and MiniMax H3 Max for b-roll. It creates thumbnails and titles, handles the entire process, and automatically uploads the result via the YouTube API—all powered by a Claude Code plugin. (youtube.com/@ctrlaltexplain for those interested).
Here are a couple examples from r/ClaudeAI:
Made entirely with Opus 5.5 + $3.21 of OpenRouter API usageClaude Code Workflow
https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1wogab3/
Jaw literally dropped. I ran the prompt from the "Made entirely with Opus 5.5" post on my own project. Here's what Claude Code made on its own for about $4.Claude Code Workflow
https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1wovwao/
Recent models have been a big step up on graphics generation. Not exactly sure why, it would be neat if they would release any quantity of technical blogs.
Yeah, and other models as well. YouTube is now full of AI explainer slop videos.
So predictable.