techchelle

Almost every SaaS app inside Vercel has now been replaced with a generated app or agent interface, deployed on Vercel. Support, sales, marketing, PM, HR, dataviz, even design and video workflows. It’s shocking. The SaaSpocalypse is both understated and overstated. Over because the key systems of record and storage are still there (Salesforce, Snowflake, etc.) Understated because the software we are generating is more beautiful, personalized, and crucially, fits our business problems better. We struggled for years to represent the health of a Vercel customer properly inside Salesforce. Too much data (trillions of consumption data points), the ontology of Vercel was a mismatch to the built-in assumptions, and the resulting UI was bizarre. We generated what we needed instead. When you don’t need a UI, you just ask an agent with natural language. We’ve also been moving off legacy systems with poor, slow, outdated, and inconsistent APIs, as well as just dropping abstraction down to more traditional databases. UI is a function 𝑓 of data (always has been), and that 𝑓 is increasingly becoming the LLM.

Software horror: litellm PyPI supply chain attack. Simple `pip install litellm` was enough to exfiltrate SSH keys, AWS/GCP/Azure creds, Kubernetes configs, git credentials, env vars (all your API keys), shell history, crypto wallets, SSL private keys, CI/CD secrets, database passwords. LiteLLM itself has 97 million downloads per month which is already terrible, but much worse, the contagion spreads to any project that depends on litellm. For example, if you did `pip install dspy` (which depended on litellm>=1.64.0), you'd also be pwnd. Same for any other large project that depended on litellm. Afaict the poisoned version was up for only less than ~1 hour. The attack had a bug which led to its discovery - Callum McMahon was using an MCP plugin inside Cursor that pulled in litellm as a transitive dependency. When litellm 1.82.8 installed, their machine ran out of RAM and crashed. So if the attacker didn't vibe code this attack it could have been undetected for many days or weeks. Supply chain attacks like this are basically the scariest thing imaginable in modern software. Every time you install any depedency you could be pulling in a poisoned package anywhere deep inside its entire depedency tree. This is especially risky with large projects that might have lots and lots of dependencies. The credentials that do get stolen in each attack can then be used to take over more accounts and compromise more packages. Classical software engineering would have you believe that dependencies are good (we're building pyramids from bricks), but imo this has to be re-evaluated, and it's why I've been so growingly averse to them, preferring to use LLMs to "yoink" functionality when it's simple enough and possible.

We're shipping a new feature in Claude Cowork as a research preview that I'm excited about: Dispatch! One persistent conversation with Claude that runs on your computer. Message it from your phone. Come back to finished work. To try it out, download Claude Desktop, then pair your phone.