I felt the same way as a naive undergrad - "every piece of code worth writing is already in a library you can import". Very clearly not the case.
When it comes to SaaS, no one cares about AI vs non AI. What your customer cares about is "do you solve this problem that makes my job hell?"/"does this tool make me awesome at my job?"
How do I know this? I built the 200th uptime monitoring alternative to Pingdom four years ago, and I'm still getting customers in this age of AI.
And to add to that, as programmers I think we sometimes miss how inefficient most people’s workflows are. Ever watched a family member, friend, etc use a computer and you just want to pull out your hair? They are just used to it, “that’s how things are”. Even a simple tool can do wonders for someone’s workflow and can worth quite a bit to them even if you think it’s easy/obvious/just-use-X-tool.
Heck, you can even solve “simple” problems for developers and they will pay to avoid having to implement it themselves. Take a thorny process, wrap it up in a clean api with a nice UI and you’re set. I pay for multiple dev tools that I could write if I wanted to put in the effort [0] but it’s not worth the effort to keep up with it and paying $XX makes the problem go away, I’m sold.
[0] and I think we often underestimate what it would actually take to re-create a tool/SaaS. The core feature might be “easy” but all the other parts are what’s hard. Coding is rarely the hardest part of building a product IMHO.
When it comes to SaaS, no one cares about AI vs non AI. What your customer cares about is "do you solve this problem that makes my job hell?"/"does this tool make me awesome at my job?"
How do I know this? I built the 200th uptime monitoring alternative to Pingdom four years ago, and I'm still getting customers in this age of AI.