Please… Enough with the Sloppy, One-Shot SaaS Replacements — Mahmoud Abdelwahab, Railway

AI Engineer · 13 min · 132 sentences · from YouTube's caption track

Each timecode opens YouTube at the start of that sentence. Line anchors (#s42) are the cue ids in the WebVTT, and every line carries its start and end seconds. All transcripts has every talk, and the whole corpus as one file.

00:00People have been saying that SAS is dead for a while now.
00:03It's not even a hot take at this point.
00:05Why pay someone to build and maintain the tools you use when you could just do it yourself?
00:10Just ask your agent to do it.
00:11And for me, there's one missing piece that rarely gets mentioned.
00:16And it's the fact that there's a gap, a big gap between working software that got oneshotted and software I would actually use.
00:23Software that sparks joy, that is polished, that feels good.
00:26and actually went on a journey to replace a bunch of SAS providers we're using internally at Railway for marketing purposes.
00:33And I just built an all-in-one tool that we use.
00:35The tool allows us to manage content for the Railway website, change log, blog.
00:40We can use it to send emails, post on all of our social platforms at the same time, manage the website's media.
00:46There's even a mini CRM so that when we're working with like external creators, we can keep track of that.
00:51There is task tracking, launch planning because you know you want to coordinate multiple things and when they'll go out.
00:57There's a calendar and at the same time there's like comments, realtime editing and it's all built using agents.
01:05I would say I felt the breakthrough when GPT6 came out and all of this is running on railway.
01:12Everything just auto deploys.
01:14And let me essentially now walk you through the principles I use to actually make sure that when I want to add a feature, it's, you know, actually polished and matches the rest of the app and at the same time
01:28the principles that you can pull from and apply when building tools of your own.
01:32So instead of doing my talk from my boring office, I decided to switch things up and do it outside.
01:38It is absolutely beautiful.
01:39Right now I'm in Edinburgh, Scotland, and it's just unreal.
01:43Like I'm on a bench outside and this is my view.
01:48Definitely a 10 out of 10 bench.
01:51Now this type of talk for me feels a little bit different than what I'm used to because I essentially will walk you through the journey of me building our own internal tools and the opinions I've developed.
02:03But I also understand that the landscape changes very very quickly.
02:08So like anything I say might change completely in like the span of months.
02:15Who knows?
02:15So I don't know.
02:16Consider this my disclaimer.
02:17Like but the time of recording is fall 2026.
02:22It's October.
02:23And yeah.
02:25So anyway, with that out of the way, uh let's talk about the first point which is texts don't matter.
02:32Now, a lot of people say that it doesn't matter what programming language you use, what framework you use.
02:38You can just ask your agent to build you anything and build it is able to do it.
02:41And 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 codebase with solid abstractions,
02:53what 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.
03:04And the reason is like it's very simple.
03:06the agent doesn't need to reinvent the same like wheel every time it tries to add a new feature or it doesn't need to introduce new patterns.
03:15It will just essentially follow existing patterns.
03:18And when it comes to like what you choose, I feel like it kind of doesn't really matter as long as you have a code base that is properly structured.
03:27But like my go-to choice today is one tan stack libraries for anything when building on the web.
03:34And if you're building anything content related, I would say definitely go with payload.
03:38Solid experience, great abstraction.
03:41I went down like a big rabbit hole of like comparing CMSS at some point because I don't believe that I should uh build it from scratch even though I can.
03:50But again, who knows?
03:51Maybe the future will change.
03:53But yeah, and that's kind of like the main first item that I kind of ran into.
04:03When you use like a lot of SAS products out there that you actually love that you use every day, when you're a user, there's like a lot of things you don't notice, but when you actually try to like replicate an experience,
04:16you quickly find out how much care and thought goes into different flows.
04:21So like something as simple as oh I want to be able to send an email or to publish something.
04:29You can easily do it by having like a good old you know just like server side rendered app with like forms that you submit.
04:38But if you try to build something that is going to be used every day that you will reach for a lot you're like oh it shouldn't feel that way.
04:46And there are kind of like a bunch of patterns that I found that agents don't typically do unless you explicitly ask them to.
04:55And this is my list.
04:56So we'll go through them one by one.
04:58And the first one is like autosave.
05:00I found that if like let's say I'm building some form of document editor, autosave is kind of like a table stakes feature.
05:08So 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
05:22so that you can let's say if as you're typing you're able to type and then it just automatically saves.
05:28And 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.
05:39So it's kind of like this these two layers that kind of guarantee that whatever it is that you're working on is just not going to be lost.
05:47Now you can also go a step further and to add like real-time collaboration so that you can have like concurrent edits.
05:55And again, my agent didn't struggle at all with adding the feature.
05:59It was like, I don't know, asking about it, reviewing how it would work, and then once that's done,
06:06just 700 million tokens later, I had real time.
06:10So, I would say in general, this is the first thing that I find agents just don't do well from a product experience perspective.
06:18Another pattern I found that agents completely forget to implement is optimistic updates.
06:22So rather than showing your users a bunch of loading spinner whenever they're taking any action, you essentially show them the success state you know optimistically and in the background you're going to sync whatever change they made.
06:35Now if the sync or the operation fails for whatever reason you just roll it back and then tell them like oh the operation work.
06:43Now of course you shouldn't blindly have optimistic updates for everything.
06:47There are some scenarios where you want to show the user a loading spinner and you're going to wait to check that everything worked properly.
06:54But in general, having optimistic updates makes the overall experience feel significantly faster, much snappier, and it will just feel much more instant.
07:05So pretty sure you can just ask your agent like, "Hey, I would like to implement optimistic updates where it makes sense.
07:11Let's come up with a plan."
07:12And it will tell you all the areas where it makes sense to do.
07:14Again, it's like it's not difficult for the agent to build it.
07:18You just need to ask and know exactly what to ask for.
07:21Now, an extension of optimistic updates, in my opinion, is giving users the ability to undo certain actions.
07:27Now, for example, if you ask your agent to implement the ability to delete records, what it will typically do is it will give you a delete button.
07:36You click it, might show a confirmation dialogue, you hit confirm, and then it will actually do the deletion.
07:42But a much nicer experience is actually allowing the user to undo that action.
07:48So they hit delete, you immediately remove the item they want to delete from the UI, but you tell them like, hey, you have like a couple of seconds where you could change your mind.
07:58And if they don't do anything, that means you actually want to delete a thing.
08:03Then you actually implement the operation.
08:05Otherwise, if they hit undo, you just bring back the change.
08:09So it's kind of like you do the operation in the background as well.
08:13It's just kind of a delayed action which kind of ties into the next point which is archiving.
08:20You should tell your agent you want the ability to archive records and be able to unarchive them because sometimes you want to hide something from the UI completely or let's say from search results
08:31and archiving will be the way to do it and you shouldn't force your user to be like well if you don't want to see this you have to delete it.
08:37and a much better experience is just the ability to walk out records.
08:41So I think it is a pattern that should definitely exist.
08:45Another big one for me is URL state.
08:47you should ask your agent to persist in the URL whenever it makes sense of course and it's so useful because whenever you have let's say a list of records
08:54and you want the ability to filter or sort them and you just have a bunch of like conditions maintaining these things in the URL makes it trivial for you to give them to someone else and then let's say another team member is just going to be able to see exactly what you want them to see now another
09:12small detail that agents don't implement out of the box is infinite scroll I don't want to be clicking on load more over and over and over or like a next page button
09:21as I scroll I should just get the data I shouldn't need to click next page and then in the end I'll just see that oh I've reached the end it's a very minor thing but also when you use something every day I think it makes a huge difference now another pattern I found that made the output significantly
09:38better is telling the agent explicitly to use existing pages as references when it comes to the UI the data fetching and how it works works and how the thing is overall structured
09:50and that made it possible for me to essentially define what good looks like once and then just reuse it for more features.
09:58Now to be completely honest sometimes even when you tell the agent like hey use page X as a reference sometimes it just doesn't follow it.
10:07I don't know if models like get dumber sometimes but sometimes it does happen.
10:12But overall, I would say that my success rate is higher whenever I tell the agent to like, well, use an existing page as a reference because you also just end up with a more consistent experience.
10:23So like as you're using your app, you're like, oh, this just matches the other part of the app if they both share like the same concept.
10:31So like if two parts of the app are essentially lists of records that you can create update and delete and like list well both of these parts should be pretty much identical.
10:43This list kind of brings me to my next point which is whenever you have opinions about something they should be packaged as agent skills and then this way your agent whenever it's building something it will actually follow
10:54those skills pretty closely.
10:55And as I was building all of our internal tooling, I found myself reaching for three Asian skills.
11:01Uh two of them are related to design engineering.
11:03So one made it easier to have better UI, better typography, better layouts as well as like better error messages in general.
11:11And the second one was a set of design engineering skills that made it easier to just have better animations and other things like that.
11:18And then last but not least is the railway Asian skills, of course.
11:21So like everything that I built for us internally at railway runs on railway of course like everything.
11:29So like buckets, databases, the app itself, the real-time server, everything.
11:34And for the agent to effectively work with railway and be able to deploy everything, you just give it the Asian skills and it was just able to do it.
11:42And yeah, so like once you have all of your Asian skills and everything, in my opinion, the final step and I think this the most important step is verification.
11:53So the agents typically whenever you ask it to build something, it's going to be like, okay, I implemented the feature, build passed, test pass, all good, right?
12:02But what I found is when you actually try out what happens, you sometimes end up with just like a very broken experience.
12:10So once you have like a verification loop in place, it's like a night and day difference because the agent you can literally see it be like, "Okay, I built this thing.
12:19I tried it.
12:20It failed.
12:21I'm going to fix it."
12:22And it just keeps going.
12:23And then in the end, it's like, "Okay, I fully tested it."
12:26And I felt this breakthrough with computer use once it got really, really good.
12:31And now everything 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
12:40and use it by actually running infrastructure and to test things end to end and the agents are very capable of doing this.
12:47You just have to tell them and once you have all those pieces I would say you will end up with solid internal tools that you can build quickly that work properly and work in a consistent way.
13:00And that's it.
13:00This was my list of principles that I use whenever I'm building any internal tools.
13:04Hope you found them useful, but more importantly, that you're inspired to build your own internal tools that feel good, that are polished, and spark joy.
13:13And I hope that you too can become your company's SAS layer.
13:17And with that, thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next