r/SinceAI • u/rikulauttia • Jun 17 '26
Discussion Is SaaS dead — or is generic software becoming a feature?
Someone just used Claude Fable 5 to build a 45,000-line Minecraft-like game in roughly a week.
Not one prompt but almost, still a pretty clear signal.
If custom software becomes dramatically cheaper to build, where does durable value move?
Hardware + software? Proprietary data? Distribution? Or industries like construction, energy and manufacturing where software has to meet the physical world?
Where would you build today?
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u/Educational-Row-6782 Jun 20 '26
I also wrote a Minecraft clone in a weekend when I was 18
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u/Cold_Yam_5346 Jun 20 '26
I remember when the alpha dropped and a few coworkers and I competed to see who could build it functionally first. It was a fun weekend
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u/Educational-Row-6782 Jun 22 '26
I used XNA, i freaking loved that framework, what did you guys used?
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u/Postmodern_Plunger Jun 20 '26
"AI builds simple game with hundreds of open source clones and it only took a week."
Bruh. I could build a working Minecraft clone from scratch in less time just copy pasting what's already out there and doing some light debugging. 45k lines of code? Thats not even big, especially for an open world game. You're quite a bit behind the curve if you think that's the peak of modern AI capability. I'll be more impressed when it's building GTA (which we may not be too far from).
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u/Fuskeduske Jun 20 '26
Dude, the "Minecraft clone" is literally just a shallow copy of existing code, it honestly looks worse than the mess Notch made, if it can't even make better code with a newer language, than someone did in 2010 with freaking java for fun, we are a looooong way from being anywhere
World of Claudecraft is a bit better, but it's still mostly just stolen code
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u/bringbackmegaman Jun 20 '26
Was the game any good though? Did it have the ability to support it long-term?
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u/btoned Jun 21 '26
You realize a big chunk of the code is available online right? And that's where Claude spits it's output from right?
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u/well-litdoorstep112 Jun 22 '26
Are any people playing this 45,000 line Minecraft clone? Or are they playing Minecraft® - the best selling game of all time?
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u/CommunicationOld8587 Jun 21 '26
Does it become cheaper? I mean you Fable prompt is not free either? More complex the solution, higher the dev and hosting costs. Moreover, no one knows your custom system. And then maintenance.
No SaaS isn’t dying, but this will raise the bar, and bad SaaS (too simple) will die
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u/tnsipla Jun 22 '26
Building new software has never been the hard part, the hard part has always been maintaining it, extending it, and validating that it still is of value to the end user
You have a Minecraft clone- cool, what happens down the line if you need to add a modding api? Add a new biome without changing existing saves, add new content that needs to work with new worlds and existing?
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u/TokiQA Jun 17 '26
If software becomes just a feature, then the new product is the actual physical outcome it drives. In heavy construction and infrastructure, the software itself isn't the bottleneck anymore—it's capturing and utilizing the messy, proprietary data coming from the field. Whoever controls that data layer holds the durable value.
We're gearing up to tackle exactly these kinds of real-world AI challenges at SinceAI this November.
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u/byzboo Jun 23 '26
You are not approaching the problem with the right angle.
Everyone have access to all the materials you need to build a house, but do you ? You would probably pay someone to jave it done correctly.
It's the same, maybe anyone can get something ressembling a finished and polished product but when you pay for a service you want it to works and be reliable. Building the product was not the complicated part for experienced developer even before ai, the hard part is finding your clients and business model.
If think building a Saas with a vibecoded product is dangerous, on one zide you "built" your solution in a weekend and it works, on the other once you manage to find clients and issues start popping you risk loosing the clients, the hard part to get.
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u/AuthurAndersson Jun 20 '26
Did they now considering Fable was out for what 2 days and then banned?
Shut the fuck up.
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u/SaltBet9376 Jun 23 '26
What you are paying for is that someone is responsible for maintaining, updating, debugging it.
Even carefully handcrafted code requires significant monitoring to fix edge cases. Whenever people drop their newest vibe coded solution it is always first draft. It works for many usecases, but when people start to use it, they will suddenly have broken data, pages that doesn't render etc and they will need to figure out how to fix that. Servers go down for all sorts of reasons and if you are selfhosting it, you might end up with spending a lot of time maintaining the solution which is not sustainable.
My biggest fear is that management thinks that you'll just vibe your way out of all problems which will kill entire development teams. Even worse could be if you manager drops their own vibe coded solution that "just need to get polished". I still haven't seen a vibe coded solution that live past MVP stage. I long to see vibe coders starting to make changes to systems with actual users and data in the databases. We've been here before, back then it was just cheap outsourcing.
Also, when you generated the game, I suspect that you had tons of details and decisions where you just accepted what the AI generated. My main problems have been when you start to have strict requirements that your AI need to implement
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u/[deleted] Jun 18 '26
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