The best code is still no code

In the past week, I have built 4 internal apps that replaced 15 SaaS tools we were using. Happy to share the bull print.

It wasn't a typo. There is no blue print - because its all bull print.

At NonBioS we use over 20 SaaS tools. We pay for all of them. We will continue to do so. We are adding 1 new SaaS tool every month on average. We will continue to add.

That doesn't mean we don't use AI to build. All the code behind NonBioS is written by NonBioS. 100% of it. But we don't write too much - only as much as we are confident about, and only what we are willing to maintain.

Somehow just because AI can now write code, we are willing to throw away what has always been golden in software engineering. That the best code, is no code. That the true cost of code, is not the cost of writing it, but of managing and maintaining it over time.

You can vibe code the SaaS you pay $20 a month for, maybe in a day. But testing it, hosting it, maintaining it is still a cost you will pay forever.

Our cheapest SaaS, costs us $10 a month. It does nothing, but ping our servers to check for uptime. Once every few minutes. To around 10 odd services which form the backbone of NonBioS. If anything goes down, someone gets a call. And it gets fixed.

We have no intention of vibe coding it ourselves. Because it just doesn't ping and check for uptime, sometimes it checks for slowness, other times it checks for keywords. If the service is slow, it sticks around and checks again. Only if it is slow for sometime, does it bother us.

And it just doesn't check from one IP. It rotates IPs and regions - so that we know that the services are up globally. And then it integrates with email, sms, phone providers to alert a geographically dispersed team.

Someone can code all of this in a day or two, using AI. But then setting up the infra will be another few days. And then you have to make sure that your infra is up. And when the alerts for service slowness goes out, it is actually the service which is slow, not your vibe coded money saver. And what if this contraption goes down itself - how do you check for that ?

Lovable got hacked. It compromised the keys and secrets that its users had kept in their service. This was the most requested feature in NonBioS for quite some time. It still is, because we haven't moved on it. Once you start holding secrets, you are putting a target on your back. And you will need to defend it with an army. We don't have one. Even if we did, I'm not sure this is the battle we will fight.

The SaaS service we pay $10 for - doesn't do all of this work for $10. They do it for a lot higher. And they split the bill across thousands of customers. That's not a bug in the model - that's the model working. Specialization, economies of scale, someone else's on-call rotation. If it were possible to do it cheaper, someone else would - and maybe they'd charge $5. And we'd move to them.

The best code is still no code. AI just made it easier to forget that.