Your product minus AI equals what?

Everyone on TikTok and Twitter is saying the same thing right now. SaaS is over. AI wrappers are too easy to build. Users will just create these tools themselves.

It's an interesting take. And partially wrong.

The problem isn't AI wrappers. The problem is bad products disguised as AI innovation. There's a simple way to tell the difference.

TL;DRRemove all AI from your product—every API call to Anthropic, OpenAI, whatever. If the core still works and solves the original problem, it's not an AI wrapper. The AI layer enhances the experience but the foundation remains. If nothing's left, you don't have a product—you have a thin interface over someone else's infrastructure.

The Simple Test

Remove all the AI from your product. Every API call to Anthropic, OpenAI, whatever service you're using. Strip it all out.

What's left?

If the core of your product still works, still solves the original problem, then it's not an AI wrapper. The AI layer is making the product better for users. Better experience, additional features, capabilities that wouldn't be possible otherwise. But the foundation remains.

If nothing's left when you remove AI, you don't have a product. You have a thin interface over someone else's infrastructure.

Search That Understands Meaning

I built this into Edicek because traditional full-text search has a fundamental limitation. It works at the database level, searching through stored content. But it's tied to specific words and phrases.

Here's what actually happens. You save a YouTube video to Edicek. The video is in English, talking about how to make tiramisu. But when you save it, you add a note in Czech explaining why you're keeping it.

Traditional search would fail here in two ways.

First, the relevance classification. A full-text search can't understand that your Czech note about "italský dezert" relates to the English captions mentioning "tiramisu recipe." It's looking for exact matches, not meaning.

Second, the language barrier. Even if everything was in English, you'd need to remember the exact phrasing from the video. If the word "recipe" never appears in the captions, searching for "recipe" won't find it. You'd have to guess the right keywords.

With AI-powered search, you type "italský dezert" and it finds the tiramisu video. The AI recognizes meaning abstractly, across languages. It understands that your Czech note and the English content are related. It knows tiramisu is an Italian dessert even if those exact words don't appear together.

Remove the AI layer and Edicek still works. You can still save bookmarks, organize them, access them later. But the search becomes a bottleneck. The way people naturally want to find their saved content stops working.

That's the difference.

The Interface Is Changing, Not The Need

So is SaaS actually ending? No. But the way we interact with these tools is changing.

Historically, the interface was always UI. Mobile app, web app, whatever. You opened something, clicked around, got what you needed.

Now we're seeing a shift. MCP servers, agents integrated into Claude or ChatGPT. People will access functionality through one central place instead of jumping between different apps.

I'm doing this with Edicek. The knowledge you save integrates directly into your chat. You don't always need to open the UI. But you still need the UI sometimes. To configure things, to browse, to adjust settings.

I don't think SaaS is becoming irrelevant. I think the pricing might change. Maybe more pay-as-you-go instead of subscriptions. And the way people interact with these services will shift. One native app orchestrating multiple tools instead of dozens of separate browser tabs.

But the underlying services? They're not going anywhere. The need remains. Just the interface is evolving.

The AI wrapper debate is missing this. It's not about whether AI powers your product. It's about whether your product would still exist, still matter, still solve something if the AI layer disappeared.

That's the only question worth asking.