But the people taking on these jobs are applying for them still. Somehow I find it hard to be sympathetic? Ok I get it the job opportunities in the Philippines aren’t great, but it’s not like you’re being forced to be an OF chatter; you can simply stop being one.

I do use some AI but its minimal; most scripts are still just algorithmic, but its easy to build them with Claude; while they are super expensive (couple of hundreds to thousands) if you bought them from some established marketeers (like Mike Rhodes demand gen script).

You can still pay someone else to spam your product on social media at a fraction of the cost of paid ad campaigns (and a fraction of the results).

I also thought it was OPUS 4.5 (also tested a lot with 4.6) and then in February switched to only using auto mode in the coding IDEs. They do not use OPUS (most of the times), and I’m ending up with a similar result after a very rough learning curve.

Now switching back to OPUS I notice that I get more out of it, but it’s no longer a huge difference. In a lot of cases OPUS is actually in the way after learning to prompt more effectively with cheaper models.

The big difference now is that I’m just paying 60-90$ month for 40-50hrs of weekly usage… while I was inching towards 1000$ with OPUS. I chose these auto modes because they don’t dig into usage based pricing or throttling which is a pretty sweet deal.

Often the "issues" aren't even bugs, its more the realization that I want some sort of functionality that they do not have; and immediately realize that if I spend a weekend on my own "base system" for that use case of SaaS; I can just attach anything to it, rather than waiting for them to release something new in 1-2 months.

But the longer I use them, the more issues I notice with them through becoming a power-user and start to understand exactly how they work. Then usually before my first months subscription runs out; if I find them useful, I do not renew the subscription, but I spend a weekend with the latest SOTA LLM in Cursor or VCcode to build out the core capabilities for myself, and then never go back to the service. Often, even as a power-user, if some SaaS has 10-20 features, I really only need 5 of them. And then I can add 2-3 more that they wouldn't ever build. The best part is that I do not need to be "production grade", because I am the only user. I don't even need cloud services, except third party APIs, because I just spin up the repo on my localhost, and launch the apps capabilities when I need them. If there is a bug, I fix it right then and there. Security? Who cares. They'd have to access my computer first.

So quite naturally I am wondering, how many other people are doing this, and how this reflects on the whole SaaS landscape. And at the same time, morals and ethics, because I am basically out here stealing ideas from people who build products, and turning them into private apps for myself with no goal of ever monetizing them. Often I am just going back and forth between those products, and copying their features into my own app to avoid needing to pay for them. And it feels like its becoming easier and easier to do this.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46169788

Points: 10

# Comments: 9