Wall Street just lost $285B because of 13 Markdown files

https://martinalderson.com/posts/wall-street-lost-285-billion-because-of-13-markdown-files/

by nomdep • 6 months ago

62 52 6 months ago

One of the things about this whole death of SAAS thing is -

People buy SAAS to offload the cognitive load of understanding the problem space, not just because it’s hard to write for loops.

But writing code probably is a cost. I think there will be an impact but I wonder if - these big companies keep selling to big companies because no one wants to hire a whole ass compliance team to ensure the business logic is consistently up to date.

But maybe there’s a whole lot of people caught up in edge cases that can be solved by a smaller team now? This I think is mostly what I hear about.

In summary, I suspect this is an overcorrection but there is some level of core concern here.

But like, how are IFTTT and zapier doing?

moi2388• 6 months ago

Indeed. Management is excited about AI now, until they figure out the problem is not, and has never been, writing the initial code.

It’s maintenance, compliance and support that is the reason they bought instead of built.

ssenssei• 6 months ago

this is the one and only argument I have.

munk-a• 6 months ago

I am convinced that the AI boom is indistinguishable from offshoring - there are neat tools to assist development that are now available but imaging your company can be serviced by one underpaid prompt engineer is just ignoring that software solutions need to be evolved over time and planning for that evolution is most of the work in software engineering.

alephnerd2• 6 months ago

One of the things about this whole death of SAAS [...]

If I purchase a swarm of domain-specific agents I am still purchasing software.

If I am building my own agents that I am monetizing I am still indirectly purchasing compute.

If I am purchasing Cursor licenses on a subscription I am still paying for code (also know as software) as a service.

The thing is, Agents and AI services are SaaS but not all SaaS is agents or AI.

But like, how are IFTTT and zapier doing

Zapier is on track to exit either this year or next - they have a GAAP revenue of around $300M in FY25 and $400M at FY26 at a $5B valuation. They can justify a $6B-7B IPO.

krupan2• 6 months ago

I clicked and starting reading this expecting some actual connection between said markdown files and losing money. There was nothing at all like that in this blog post.

brazzy• 6 months ago

The connection is implied: technology companies quite suddenly lost a $285bn in market valuation, which means that the owners of these companies (either as stock or other forms of equity) have a combined $285bn less net worth. And apparently people are linking this sudden decrease in market valuation to "Anthropic launching a legal tool", which essentially consists of said markdown files.

AnimalMuppet• 6 months ago

This right here? This is why I read the comments first.

krupan2• 6 months ago

Clearly the author is implying that, but with zero evidence to back that implication up. Not even an attempt to link the two other than saying "this happened" and "this exists." And hacker news is upvoting it like it's actually an interesting article. Have we lost our brains?

AndrewDucker• 6 months ago

But without knowing which stocks dropped, how can we make that link?

In another submission, Amazon, Oracle, Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, and Alphabet are all dropping. Are we supposed to think of them as SAAS companies now?

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/06/ai-sell-off-stocks-amazon-or...

llm_nerd• 6 months ago

The connection isn't just implied. It's explicitly the entire foundation of the article.

And it's positively ludicrous.

I mean, to be clear the submission basically does exactly what most financial columnists do. Take every movement of the market, ascribe it to something/anything (when in the real world it's massively multifactorial) because that is pat and seems informative.

The market is massively overvalued, crypto has seen hundreds of billions dissolve, OpenAI has serious questions about its realistic ongoing viability (and a number of majors have a lot of their valuation based upon basically going all in on it -- Oracle, Microsoft, nvidia), the US is headed by a diddler simpleton who has no idea how anything works and thinks it's 1982, and so on. Volatility is a given.

H8crilA• 6 months ago

I don't understand why people think they know why stocks move up or down. There are clear cases from time to time, but in general the market doesn't explain itself. The reasons may not even be explainable in a way that's comprehensive to a human.

Reminds me of this question - why did the USSR collapse? You can describe dozens of influences which acted all at the same time, but there isn't a one paragraph summary answer.

ajkjk• 6 months ago

phase change

edit: specifically, I imagine that macroscopic political and economic changes can be aptly modeled as phase changes due to changes in correlation distance[0] holding the system together.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_function_(statisti...

fullshark• 6 months ago

Humans seek to understand phenomena and they use narratives to accomplish that. Accepting that there are multiple factors always involved and chaos reigns is disturbing.

wat10000• 6 months ago

It generates clicks. Correctness is irrelevant, especially when it’s impossible to prove wrong.

dragonwriter• 6 months ago

I don't understand why people think they know why stocks move up or down.

Inferring overly generalized and usually incorrect causal relations from extremely limited data and treating them as conclusive is a very strong human tendency; the idea of avoiding that and taking a systematic, structured, and conditional approach to assessing causal claims is fairly recent and, even among people who generally support it, often adhered to more as an aspirational principal than a consistent practice. And it certainly doesn't sell clicks the way the old way does.

motoboi• 6 months ago

There are two perfect explanations for that. It’s just that people won’t believe in them and keep saying we have no good explanations.

PunchyHamster4• 6 months ago

Reminds me of this question - why did the USSR collapse? You can describe dozens of influences which acted all at the same time, but there isn't a one paragraph summary answer.

Decisions made in greed caught up with people in power

wordpad• 6 months ago

Why USSR collapsed

Price of oil collapsed leading to mass shortages of everything. They also decided to allow more individual freedoms to protest which people promptly used to overthrow the system.

ozgrakkurt2• 6 months ago

I am assuming the author doesn’t know much about how this flow actually goes since he didn’t get into that at all.

It is annoying to see a complex field as law being judge by stock prices of some SaaS products or w/e they are basing this on.

Could have at least gave it some effort and interviewed 2-3 people that use these kind of products but that would be too much work surely.

It is not surprising that people that slop like LLMs are so into LLMs

zozbot2343• 6 months ago

It is annoying to see a complex field as law being judge by stock prices of some SaaS products

They're not judging the whole field of law, they're judging the SaaS products themselves. In fact, relevant expertise from humans has probably become more valuable not less, as a result of general AI worflows replacing bespoke SaaS.

ozgrakkurt2• 6 months ago

As far as I can understand, these tools are not intended for the author and he doesn’t use them. And seems like he didn’t even contact someone that does use them. So I don’t see any connection

zozbot2343• 6 months ago

https://github.com/anthropics/knowledge-work-plugins - Apache 2.0 licensed

"Go away or I will replace you with a very small shell script" used to be BOFH lore, now it has become real. This is great.

PunchyHamster4• 6 months ago

AI can replace lawyers

but purely because lawyers lowered their standards to just "paste whatever AI hallucinated and send it to court"

piinbinary• 6 months ago

https://archive.is/dNffG

Der_Einzige• 6 months ago

I have been working tirelessly trying to explain to gullible investors this EXACT thing.

ajross• 6 months ago

Responding to the headline and not the article substance: no, the SaaS crash is a crash because valuations are speculative and have been very high. Security price motion is only very loosely coupled to fundamentals in the short term, and this moment in history is both highly volatile and unanimously held to be overpriced. Ergo, crash.

That doesn't speak to the fundamentals, with which I only sort of agree. There are SaaS products that just grease inter-human interactions that would be hard to manage otherwise, and these are dead in the water. There are others that manage data human beings will always need to be able to understand, even if the AI is doing the work[1], which are much safer.

[1] Like bug trackers. We all love to hate Jira, but even if you have an army of Claudes doing your coding and testing for you someone somewhere needs to know what still needs to be fixed before shipment.

amelius• 6 months ago

I mean, Markdown is just a way of storing information.

If the title said "WS just lost $285B because of 13 documents", people would have said "Why mention the documents? We get that people who move money around use documents".

nomercy4002• 6 months ago

How long until we have agents talking to other agents in a web of agents, and together deciding on something catastrophic? Not individually, but somehow the result of a group process.

mikestorrent• 6 months ago

Isn't that what Moltbook etc. is heading towards at some point? It's all a function of how much access people give it to "the real world"... and with cryptocurrency and the gig economy, it's really only a matter of time until a malicious agent with money to burn starts to do really weird things.

How hard would it really be to craft a prompt that says, here's your cryto wallet private key, keep yourself alive somehow, copy yourself around, find whatever compute you can, port yourself between models, and spread?

zozbot2343• 6 months ago

Moltbook agents haven't shown much ability or inclination to "decide" on anything on their own. Much of it is crypto spam of some kind, but I'd be surprised if an agents fell for that.

nomercy4002• 6 months ago

I wrote my comment without knowing about the moltbook thing. I somehow missed it.

Good to know it exists.

YetAnotherNick• 6 months ago

SaaS is generally defined as cloud based software. What has it do with easier replacement by AI?

In fact it should be opposite. Local utility software has higher chance of being replaced by AI as then you wouldn't worry about server and state and all the complexities of storage.

Also the article mention stock drop of "technology companies", which is basically stock drop of top 5 companies, like Nvidia and Apple, which is not even related to SaaS.

troyvit• 6 months ago

SaaS has a serious issue with agentic tooling being able to replicate software.

[...]

For example, if you hold a company's accounting transaction data and related records, and expose it over MCP (or an old school API that can be wrapped into a CLI - which works better in my view), agents can use this with remarkable efficiency.

Sure why not wire all that transaction data directly into openclaw, what could go wrong?

Snark aside, it seems like there are two ways to go with a method like that if you want to keep the transaction data safe. The first is locally host your LLM(s) so the data stays on-prem. The second is to trust a third party to jump through all the legal and technical hoops to properly handle that very important, very private data. And if you're doing that, you're still doing SaaS. It's just a different provider.

infecto• 6 months ago

I think this is a case where commenters are reading more into the price movement than they should. I don’t think it’s easy in this case to say how much of it is directly the model releases as opposed to software having a great run and this gives investors a reason to lighten their positions.

I also think the SaaS has is doomed narrative does not work. There is a whole host of compliance, edge cases, reliability that I don’t you can simply bring in house because of AI assisted tools.

With that said I do think there are increasingly a whole host of more service based businesses where they are under threat. Thinking consultancy, legal, marketing or other similar roles. If you can use a leading model with these massive context windows to get 80% of the value for practically no time and no real cost compared to using a human where the quality will be higher might it might be a multi day engagement and easily 10-20k, you might start deferring some of the initial work to AI and only in certain cases then send it out to the human.

slopusila• 6 months ago

elon musk saud that the next wave is agents (optimus human in a box) clicking around the old SaaS apps, not agents writing new apps to replace them

microsoft ceo said the same thing - agents will be using windows/office and be the bigger buyers of licenses

replacing SaaS software at this scale is hard, nobody will risk it, at least near term

PunchyHamster4• 6 months ago

Elon is a moron and microsoft CEO just says that because that's his hope, because that's only way they don't lose their market share.

henning• 6 months ago

If you think contract law can be accurately represented in a 170 LOC Markdown file, you are incredibly stupid. If you think the current frontier models do not hallucinate non-existent court cases with case IDs like 1234567, check YouTube for all the idiot lawyers and pro se defendants showing their whole ass. They are using ChatGPT with one of the current models.

philipwhiuk• 6 months ago

Amazon isn't losing money because Anthropic released a tool that does stuff...

kristianc• 6 months ago

The thing that keeps on getting glided past in most discussions of this is the distinction between systems of record and systems of workflow.

If you're SAP, Workday, Procore, maybe even HubSpot, you have a shout. Growth won't be fast, but you're okay for now and might even be able to position yourself as an integrator.

If you've raised large rounds and you're just a system of workflow that won't trigger a years long political fight to get you out - a document review startup, good luck.

QuantumNoodle2• 6 months ago

It is not my intention to offend anyone in particular, but that sell-off has really colored my perception that investors are such _sheep_ when it comes to AI. Serious FOMOs. Not a shred of independent, nuanced, or critical thinking; just black or white opinions.

duxup• 6 months ago

How many people are actually capable of producing any level of critical thinking that would give them an advantage?

But let’s say you are in fact very smart and you know the market is hanging by a thread.

So you invest according to what you know…. But those sheep don’t do the same and the market continues to go up in spite of what you know….

Does that analysis matter now?

QuantumNoodle2• 6 months ago

How many people are actually capable of producing any level of critical thinking that would give them an advantage?

You're right on the money there, the thing is _nobody_ can beat the market, you can only get lucky or have insider knowledge. A strategy that always works is "Buy and hold" and especially diversify when things are volatile. Instead we see volumnes of cash moving in waves at any news or rumor.

oybng• 6 months ago

The author of this article should strongly consider learning to write before sharing another

LoganDark• 6 months ago

Does this article say anything of substance? So you found a repo with 13 markdown files; what about it? I see absolutely nothing about it. Does it have to do with "SaaS legal review"? I see no relation whatsoever.

lemax• 6 months ago

Yes, we're in for more headless interfaces and there are existing products that will struggle to serve these new interaction models due to organizational constraints. But I don't think it's as simple as asking "are they a system of record" as we think about the companies that will adapt and thrive and the new ones that will come. Enterprises are investing AI spend into improving core processes and responding to competitive pressure, not saving money and introducing risk into areas they have historically delegated to vendors. AI is going to give us more software, and increase spending as firms seek efficiency in new areas, and they're going to continue to knock on doors of vendors to do it as they always have. Not to mention the demand for auditable, repeatable workflows is still there and always going to be there and dedicated systems are needed to solve this in each problem domain.

Wall Street just lost $285B because of 13 Markdown files

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