Building Breakwater with AI
1 points by bencurtis
1 points by bencurtis
B2B SaaS in 2026 is going to be wild thanks to Claude and other AI coding assistants. It’s scary, exciting, and mind-blowing all at the same time. The barrier to building new products has dropped dramatically. Solo founders and small teams can move at a pace that wasn’t possible before, and be more ambitious in what they can build. The bottleneck is no longer “can I build this?” Instead, it’s “should I build this?” and “do people want this?” and “how will I get this in front of people?”
I am convinced we are going to see a significant fracturing of the software ecosystem as more and more people decide to "just" use AI to build the thing. I don't think it'll all be solo founders and the like, I suspect we're going to see something more akin to the torrents being used far more often for copyright violation than, for example, distributing large distros quickly.
Most of the users are going to be smaller people using AI to build something for themselves that they otherwise would have had to pay a software provider / developer for. Or even software that was free (as in both beer and freedom) but which the user didn't want to use. Outside of the obvious ethical implications of prompting an agent to build something covered by someone else's patents or copyrights, I'm not sure how I feel about this, but my gut feeling is this will overall be a negative with a hockey-stick shaped spike of abandoned and out of date projects that are rife with security holes.
I could be wrong, and would love to see this somehow turn into a positive.
Most of the users are going to be smaller people using AI to build something for themselves that they otherwise would have had to pay a software provider / developer for.
I don't think it's as simple as people building it themselves to save having to pay for existing packages. Most humans (at least in a business context) value their time too much to spend even a dozen hours prompting an agent to get the software they need if they could shell out $50 or $100 or even $500/month to a SaaS product that solves the problem already.
What's much more interesting to me is when people build custom software that they could otherwise not have afforded at all. Developers are expensive - there are plenty of people out there who need custom software but not enough to spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars having it built for them (while simultaneously learning the extremely challenging skills of product/project/engineering management needed to get what they want.)