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People have been saying that SaaS is dead for a while now.

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It's not even a hot take at this point.

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Why pay someone to build and maintain the tools you use when you could just do it yourself?

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Just ask your agent to do it.

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And for me, there's one missing piece that rarely gets mentioned.

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And it's the fact that there's a gap, a big gap between working software that got one-shotted

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and software I would actually use.

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Software that sparks joy, that is polished, that feels good.

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And I actually went on a journey to replace a bunch of SaaS providers we were using internally

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at Railway for marketing purposes.

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And I just built an all-in-one tool that we use.

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The tool allows us to manage content

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for the Railway website, change log, blog.

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We can use it to send emails,

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post on all of our social platforms at the same time,

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manage the website's media.

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There's even a mini CRM so that when we're working

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with external creators, we can keep track of that.

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There is task tracking, launch planning,

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because you wanna coordinate multiple things

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and when they'll go out, there's a calendar.

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and at the same time there's like comments real-time editing and it's all built using

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agents i would say i felt the breakthrough when gpt6 came out and all of this is running on railway

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everything just auto deploys and let me essentially now walk you through the principles i use

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to actually make sure that when i want to add a feature it's you know actually polished and

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matches the rest of the app and at the same time the principles that you can pull from and apply

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when building tools of your own so instead of doing my talk from my boring office i decided to

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switch things up and do it outside it is absolutely beautiful right now i'm in edinburgh scotland

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and it's just unreal like i'm on a bench outside and this is my view definitely a 10 out of 10

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bench. Now, this type of talk for me feels a little bit different than what I'm used to, because

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I essentially will walk you through the journey of me building our own internal tools and the

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opinions I've developed. But I also understand that the landscape changes very, very quickly.

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So like anything I say might change completely in like the span of months. Who knows? So I don't

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know consider this my disclaimer like but the time of recording is fall 2026 it's october and

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yeah so anyway with that out of the way uh let's talk about the first point which is text acts don't

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matter now a lot of people say that it doesn't matter what programming language you use what

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framework you use you can just ask your agent to go do anything and those are able to do it

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And while I agree to some extent, what I found is when you're building a tool that you will actually use, when you give the agent a proper code base with solid abstractions, what ends up happening is whenever you're working, let's say, on a new feature, you end up with a much more consistent result that is similar to what you've already built before.

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And the reason is, like, it's very simple.

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The agent doesn't need to reinvent the same, like, wheel every time it tries to add a new feature,

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or it doesn't need to introduce new patterns.

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It will just essentially follow existing patterns.

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And when it comes to, like, what you choose, I feel like it kind of doesn't really matter

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as long as you have a code base that is properly structured.

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But my go-to choice today is, one, TanStack libraries for anything when building on the web.

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And if you're building anything content-related, I would say definitely go with payload.

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Solid experience, great abstraction.

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I went down a big rabbit hole of comparing CMSs at some point because I don't believe that I should build it from scratch, even though I can.

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But again, who knows?

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Maybe the future will change.

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but yeah and that's kind of like the main first item that i kind of ran into

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when you use like a lot of sas products out there that you actually love they use every day

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when you're a user there's like a lot of things you don't notice but when you actually try to like

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replicate an experience you quickly find out how much care and thought goes into different flows

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So something as simple as, oh, I want to be able to send an email or to publish something.

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You can easily do it by having a good old server-side rendered app with forms that you submit.

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But if you try to build something that is going to be used every day that you will reach for

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a lot, you're like, oh, it shouldn't feel that way.

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And there are kind of like a bunch of patterns that I found that agents don't typically do unless you explicitly ask them to.

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And this is my list. So we'll go through them one by one.

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And the first one is like autosave. I found that if, like, let's say I'm building some form of document editor, autosave is kind of like a table states feature.

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So rather than manually clicking save to save things, you just ask it to automatically save progress in the background and to make sure that it's like a non-blocking action.

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So that you can, let's say, as you're typing, you're able to type and then it just automatically saves.

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And one other kind of like step further that you could do is to also prevent the browser tab from closing if there are unsafe changes.

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So it's kind of like these two layers that kind of guarantee that whatever it is that you're working on is just not going to be lost.

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Now, you can also go a step further and to add like real time collaboration so that you can have like concurrent edits.

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And again, my agent didn't struggle at all with adding the feature.

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It was like, I don't know, asking about it, reviewing how it would work.

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And then once that's done, just 700 million tokens later, I had real time.

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So I would say in general, this is the first thing that I find agents just don't do well from a product experience perspective.

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Another pattern I found that agents completely forget to implement is optimistic updates.

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So rather than showing your users a bunch of loading spinner whenever they're taking any action,

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you essentially show them the success state optimistically.

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And in the background, you're going to sync whatever change they made.

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Now, if the sync or the operation fails for whatever reason,

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you just roll it back and then tell them, like, oh, the operation didn't work.

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Now, of course, you shouldn't blindly have optimistic updates for everything.

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There are some scenarios where you want to show the user a loading spinner

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and they're going to wait to check that everything worked properly.

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But in general, having optimistic updates

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makes the overall experience feel significantly faster,

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much snappier, and it will just feel much more instant.

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So pretty sure you can just ask your agent like,

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hey, I would like to implement optimistic updates where it makes sense.

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Let's come up with a plan and it will tell you all the areas

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where it makes sense to do.

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Again, it's like it's not difficult for the agent to build it.

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you just need to ask and know exactly what to ask for. Now an extension of optimistic updates in my

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opinion is giving users the ability to undo certain actions. Now for example if you ask your agent to

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implement the ability to delete records what it will typically do is it will give you a delete

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button you click it might show a confirmation dialog you hit confirm and then it will actually

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do the deletion. But a much nicer experience is actually allowing the user to undo that action

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so they could delete you immediately remove the item they want to delete from the ui but you tell

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them like hey you have like a couple of seconds where you could change your mind and if they don't

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do anything that means you actually want to delete a thing then you actually implement the operation

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otherwise if they hit undo you just bring back the change so it's kind of like you do the operation

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in the background as well it's just kind of a delayed action which kind of ties into the next

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point, which is archiving, you should tell your agent you want the ability to archive records

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and be able to unarchive them. Because sometimes you want to hide something from the UI completely,

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or let's say from search results, and archiving will be the way to do it. And you shouldn't

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force your user to be like, well, if you don't want to see this, you have to delete it.

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Any much better experience is just the ability to archive records. So I think it is a pattern

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that should definitely exist.

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Another big one for me is URL state.

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You should ask your agent to persist in the URL

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whenever it makes sense, of course.

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And it's so useful because whenever you have,

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let's say, a list of records

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and you want the ability to filter or sort them

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and you just have a bunch of conditions,

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maintaining these things in the URL

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makes it trivial for you to give them to someone else.

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And then, let's say, another team member

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is just going to be able to see

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exactly what you want them to see.

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Now another small detail that agents don't implement out of the box is infinite scroll.

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I don't want to be clicking on lobe more over and over and over or like a next page button.

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As I scroll, I should just get the data.

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I shouldn't need to click next page.

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And then in the end, I'll just see that, oh, I've reached the end.

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It's a very minor thing.

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But also when you use something every day, I think it makes a huge difference.

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Now another pattern I found that made the output significantly better is telling the

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agent explicitly to use existing pages as references when it comes to the ui the data

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fetching and how it works and how the thing is overall structured and that made it possible for

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me to essentially define what good looks like once and then just reuse it for more features now

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to be completely honest sometimes even when you tell the agent like hey use page x as a reference

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sometimes it just doesn't follow it i don't know if models like get dumber sometimes but sometimes

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it does happen but overall i would say that my success rate is higher whenever i tell the agent

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to like well use an existing page as a reference because you also just end up with a more consistent

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experience so like as you're using your app you're like oh this just matches the other part of the

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app if they both share like the same concept so like if two parts of the app are essentially

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lists of records that you can create, update, and delete and list. Well, both of these parts

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should be pretty much identical. This list kind of brings me to my next point, which is whenever

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you have opinions about something, they should be packaged as agent skills. And then this way,

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your agent, whenever it's building something, it will actually follow those skills pretty closely.

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And as I was building all of our internal tooling, I found myself reaching for three agent skills.

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two of them are related to design engineering so one made it easier to have better ui better

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typography better layouts as well as like better error messages in general and the second one was

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a set of design engineering skills that made it easier to just have better animations and other

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things like that and then last but not least is the railway agent skills of course so like

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everything that i built for us internally at railway runs on railway of course like everything

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So like buckets, databases, the app itself, the real-time server, everything.

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And for the agent to effectively work with Railway and be able to deploy everything,

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you just give it the Railway agent skills and it was just able to do it.

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And yeah, so like once you have all of your agent skills and everything,

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in my opinion, the final step, and I think the most important step, is verification.

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So the agents typically, whenever you ask it to build something,

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it's going to be like, okay, I implemented the feature.

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build pass, test pass, all good, right?

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But what I found is when you actually try out what happens,

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you sometimes end up with just like a very broken experience.

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So once you have like a verification loop in place,

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it's like a nine day difference

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because the agent, you can literally see it,

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be like, okay, I built this thing.

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I tried it.

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It failed.

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I'm going to fix it.

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And it just keeps going.

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And then in the end, it's like, okay, I fully tested it.

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And I felt this breakthrough with computer use once it got really, really good.

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And now every time I want to add a new feature, I literally just in the end say, well, you should verify that the feature works end-to-end and use it by actually running infrastructure and to test things end-to-end.

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And the agents are very capable of doing this.

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You just have to tell them.

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and once you have all those pieces,

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I would say you will end up with solid internal tools

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that you can build quickly,

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that work properly and work in a consistent way.

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And that's it.

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This was my list of principles that I use

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whenever I'm building any internal tools.

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Hope you found them useful.

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But more importantly,

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that you're inspired to build your own internal tools

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that feel good, that are polished and spark joy.

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And I hope that you too can become your company's SaaS layer.

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And with that, thank you so much for watching, and I'll see you in the next one.