Nice, yeah I feel like there's a big opportunity for tech workers who are product-adjacent to use LLMs to get up to speed building SaaS etc.

Are you worried by any of those claims about SaaS being dead because of AI? lol

No. I'm not just creating a super-generic vibe-coded solution. It's a niche product that people are willing to pay for.

https://rivianroamer.com/

Looks cool. Are you a Rivian owner who solved their own problem or did you stumble upon it randomly??

Thanks! I used to own a Tesla and there were similar platforms out there. Bought a Rivian and wanted something like that. I started building this before AI-assisted coding was very popular. But it greatly increased my productivity.

There is that quote "there are cathedrals everywhere for those with the eyes to see". I feel like there is a solid variation with solid business opportunities instead of cathedrals haha.

I've found AI to be a big productivity boost for myself, but I don't really use it to generate much actual code. Maybe it could do more for me, idk, but I also don't feel like I'm being left behind. I actually enjoy writing code, but hate most other programming tasks so it's been nice to just focus on what I like. Feels good to have it generate a UI skeleton for me so I can just fill out the styles and stuff. Or figure out stupid build config and errors. Etc etc.

Anyways congrats on the product. I know a lot of people are negative about productivity claims and I'm certainly skeptical of a lot of them too, but if you asked most programmers 5 years ago if a super-autocomplete which could generate working code snippets and debug issues in a project would boost productivity everyone would say yes lol. People are annoyed that its overhyped, but there should still be room for reasonable hype imo.

First of all, thank you. I've always been told I have a back for seeing opportunities others don't.

For me, I always had the ideas and even as a competent engineer, the speed of development annoyed me.

I think folks get annoyed when their reality doesn't match other people's claims. But I have friends who aren't engineers who have launched successful SaaS products. I don't know if it's jealousy or what but people are quite passionate about how it doesn't have productivity gains.

Hell, I remember Intellisense in Visual Studio being a big boon for me. Now I can have tasks asynchronous, even if not faster, it frees up my time.

Sounds nice, for how many years have you had that annual recurring revenue so far?

I only started charging customers in September. Super-linear growth. I launched annual subscriptions and within less than a week > 15% of customers switched.

Details would help your argument. Since many did the same thing, before the AI wave...

Is the business 3 months old now?

It's not an argument, it's a fact.

Its also a fact my stopped clocked will show the correct time two times a day :-)

Fair. I've had super-linear growth since launching in September. Zero marketing outside of a referral program. People genuinely love what I'm building. I get multiple emails per week about how people appreciate the software and how I send out weekly emails about everything I've launched.

The whole point, that you seem to be have missed by now by the third interaction, is how was AI the crux of it...

AI enabled me to ship more features faster, increasing the value to customers. It's that simple.

I'm with you. I own a business and have created multiple tools for myself that collectively save me hours every month. What were boring, tedious tasks now just get done. I understand that the large-scale economic data are much less clear about productivity benefits, in my individual case they could not be more apparent.

I'm thirding this sentiment!

I run an eComm business and have built multiple software tools that each save the business $1000+ per month, in measurable wage savings/reductions in misfires.

What used to take a month or so can now be spat out in less than a week, and the tools are absolutely fit for purpose.

It's arguably more than that, since I used to have to spread that month of work over 3-6 months (working part time while also doing daily tasks at the warehouse), but now can just take a week WFH and come back with a notable productivity gain.

I will say, to give credit to the anti-AI-hype crowd, that I make sure to roll the critical parts of the software by hand (things like the actual calculations that tell us what price an item at, for example). I did try to vibecode too much once and it backfired.

But things like UIs, task managers for web apps, simple API calls to print a courier label, all done with vibes.

Understanding when to make something deterministic and not is critical. Taste and judgement is critical.

Every hype AI post is like this. “I’m making $$$ with these tools and you’re ngmi” I completely understand the joys of a few good months but this is the same as the people working two fang jobs at the start of Covid. Illusionary and not sustainable.

Cool. I have super-linear MRR/ARR growth with over 15% of customers paying for an annual plan. Zero marketing, word of mouth growth.

https://rivianroamer.com/

I built and debugged an embedded stub loader for Rp2350 to program MRAM and validate hardware status for a satellite. About 2.5 hours of my time, a lot of it while supervising students/doing other things.

This would have been a couple day+ unpleasant task before; possibly more. I had been putting it off because scouring datasheets and register maps and startup behavior is not fun.

It didn’t know how to troubleshoot the startup successfully itself, though. I had to advise it on a debugging strategy with sentinel values to bisect. But then once explained it fixed the defects and succeeded.

LLMs struggle in large codebases and the benefit is much smaller now. But that capability is growing fast, and not everything software developers do is large.

Has anyone noticed Amazon or AWS shipping features faster than their pre-GenAI baseline? I haven't

I'm noticeably faster shipping.

Everytime someone say something like that there is no link to the product. Maybe because it doesn't exist ?

What an awful comment. The person above you is now flagged because of your paranoia. Of course later they post a link to exactly what they built.

I don't even know what flagged means lol

Historically in a lot of niches such as search marketing etc, people would not name their successful projects because the barrier to entry is low.

It someone can use AI to make a $50,000/year project in three months, then someone else can also do so.

Obviously some people hype and lie. But also obviously some people DID succeed at SEO/Affiliate marketing/dropshipping etc. AI resembled those areas in that the entry barrier is low.

To get actual reports you often need to look to open source. Simon Willison details how he used it extensively and he has real projects. And here Mitchell Hashimoto, creator of Ghostty, details how he uses it: https://mitchellh.com/writing/my-ai-adoption-journey

Update: OP posted their own project however. Looks nice!

This is definitely the case. I have a project that while not wildly profitable yet, is producing real revenue, but that I will not give details of because the moat is so small. The main moat is that I know the potential is real, and hopefully not enough other people do, yet. I know it will disappear quickly, so I'm trying to make what I can of it while it's there. I may talk about it once the opportunity is gone.

It involves a whole raft of complex agents + code they've written, but that code and the agents were written by AI over a very short span of time. And as much as I'd like to stroke my own ego and assume it's one of a kind, realistically if I can do it, someone else can too.

Still need good taste and judgement to build the thing people actually want to use.

He is overwhelmed with customers. Can't risk any more awareness.

Legitimately am. I get daily emails from customers telling me how much they love my product. Go search Google, it's free.

Search for "Rivian Roamer".

This level of toxicity is why I'm reminded to stay away from HN.

lmfao you're doing great man, keep posting.

Cool! Can we see it?

I'm not doubting of you or anything, but you just proved point above by saying you have a successful project without even mentioning which project is that.

The only thing the comments told me is that people lake judgement and taste to do it themselves. It's not hard, identify a problem that's niche enough for a problem you can solve.

Stop arguing on HN and get to building.