The Sideprocalypse

Source: Hacker News

The Current Landscape

You can’t open a feed today without AI boosters flinging word salad like “agentic engineering” or “openclaw” into your face. Predicting the future is hard—ask me about selling NVIDIA stock in early 2022—but one thing is clear.

There’s a Swedish proverb, “elda för kråkorna” (building a fire for the crows), that captures the futility of lighting a warm fire indoors and then throwing the doors wide open, inviting snow and sleet.

The SaaS Dream Is Dead

Are you one of the thousands of developers dreaming of a side‑project SaaS—working evenings and weekends, hoping for a few hundred paying customers at $19.99 a month? Sorry, that dream is dead. Every minute you invest—whether your own time or that of an LLM agent—is a minute for the crows. Imagine your fragile idea buried in a backyard pit while Claude and Gemini stand over it, chuckling.

Even if your product is higher quality—knowing about TTFP, INP, or not exposing your Supabase token—those metrics no longer matter in 2026. Quality is not a metric anyone cares about anymore. We’ve been conditioned to accept:

• tombstone spinners on first load
• Purchase flows that simply don’t work (example)

React has dominated the web, Safari has limited it, Google has stopped linking to it, and the major corporations that hold the cards don’t want you to succeed. The future of software, if there is one, lies in high‑touch enterprise sales. Only a handful of companies can make money on the Internet today; if you value self‑preservation, you need to latch onto one of them.

The Broader Collapse

If you’re a hopeful SaaS builder, you may be first in line, but you can take grim satisfaction in the fact that the “sloptimists,” hype‑men, and sleepless agents‑are‑working‑while‑I‑sleep crowd are equally doomed when reality catches up. The marginal value of code today is dropping dramatically. Josh Collinsworth puts it well: AI boosterism is a class privilege. This revolution will eventually consume itself. The imagined armies of unstoppable bots will build software empires that no one finds, no one pays for, and whose tokens are burned for someone else’s gain—a sad bonfire offering to the datacenter, with GPU crows cawing overhead.