Lots of yes-but’ing here, inc. this gem for y’all security folk:
Wall Street doesn’t understand the reluctance of enterprise CIOs to trust startups with mission-critical data or value the expertise needed to run SaaS reliably at scale as much as the shiny new thing.
AI won’t replace you. Your boss using AI to cut costs will.
Your boss is not incentivized by utopian imagination, he is incentivized by showing his boss a lowering of costs so he can keep his job and lifestyle. The miraculous science fiction future AI shills often proselytize will not be realized in the halls of SaaS companies, because the incentives for that future do not exist in a capitalist framework.
You need to write SEO and enterprise research text for AIs now, in addition to humans. Does this mean separate pages, often hidden from humans like we see for search engine SEO? Probably.
A Gartner survey of 377 U.S. consumers, conducted in June and July 2025, revealed that rather than shortcutting decisions, AI features are lengthening the research journey. Thirty-one percent of consumers surveyed say AI summaries cause them to spend more time searching for information, compared to just 16% who spend less. Over two-thirds continue past Google’s AI Overview, signaling that summaries are not the final answer. When researching purchases, 31% of consumers consider more product options due to AI overviews, versus only 7% who consider fewer.
And:
“Winning visibility now means optimizing for both AI-driven answers and classic search results, with content that is specific, conversational, and trustworthy. That means refreshing content regularly across search, social, and retail platforms, as well as investing in comparison tools, FAQs, and reviews to meet consumers' demand for deeper research and broader consideration sets.”
TikTok ownership in the US is one the strangest tech stories ever.
Sixty-seven percent of online youths ages 12 to 17 report using it weekly, and nearly 50% of US online adults under 45 report using it at least weekly.
See also Kelsey’s (Forrester) predictions on what will change, plus Usage in the US. There’s also a link round-up from Kagi News.
For a long time I foolishly scorned George Orwell. I think the prejudice is common among people of my generation (well among people of my generation who care about such things). Orwell is viewed as a fetish of boomer columnists – the types of people who sit in their houses in Hampstead being paid six figures by broadsheet newspapers not really trying with their prose and fondly imagining they are working in plain Orwellian sentences and fearlessly speaking truth to power."
SaaS businesses not looking good now:
Traditional estimates for this scope of work: Method Estimate COCOMO (lines-based) ~20,000 hours Feature decomposition ~9,000-12,000 hours Industry benchmark 5-6 years solo, 12-15 months with 5 junior engineers Traditional cost $750,000 – $1,500,000
What I spent: $1,800. That’s a 99.8% cost reduction. It’s also not a fair comparison—traditional development wouldn’t produce identical output. But the delta is large enough that precision doesn’t matter.
🔗 On Running a Startup of Claude Code Agents: What You Get For a Billion Tokens a Month
Be well known around the company, do some personal marketing, “have an impact” on other teams and make sure people know about it. // When there’s blood on the boardroom floor, there is no “I” in team.
🔗 Microsofts Ex-VP of HR Shares How to Avoid the ‘Underperformer’ Label
