So @swyx and team are still judging his amazing “Kill My SaaS in one weekend” contest, where you could win 10K to replace his 40K/year con…

So @swyx and team are still judging his amazing “Kill My SaaS in one weekend” contest, where you could win 10K to replace his 40K/year conference submission (CFP) and scheduling SaaS. I think 68 people completed the challenge, and some are downright incredible achievements. It's been amazing working with many of them in the Discord channel for the last 10 days. (The competition deadline was extended by 7 days.) For me personally, I achieved and exceeded my own goal: we not only killed the SaaS we were using for our CFP process, but as of yesterday, we just killed the adjacent SaaS we used for conference scheduling. And it wasn't out of malice — we actually loved using it for ten years. In fact, whenever I go to a conference and see this tool, I smile and think, "Now here are some organizers that love their attendees." Two weeks ago, I interviewed Ann Perry, who has been doing our conference operations for 6+ years. The thing she complained about most was creating the outward-facing schedules. It was a multi-hour process, laying out the days, defining the talk slots, lunch, breaks, filling them with talks/speakers, etc. Worse, after doing all that work, she couldn't clone a day or an event, so she had to start from scratch for every day, and for every event! Hearing details like this made me realize why we often published schedules so late in the process — I'm guilty making tons of changes to "create the perfect program," each of them creating a costly downstream consequence for Ann. It just wasn't worth it to publish until the schedule stabilized. Last week, we were under pressure to publish a schedule for our Oct 7-8 — so I wanted to see what the scheduling functionality that was created in my tool (Curtain Call CFP) to conform to Swyx's requirements. I was horrified by what the software factory built... In my defense, I paid the most attention to the submission review process — it was the part I cared about, because it made me most angry with the tools we used for the past 10+ years. There were many sections that I had the software factory create, designed to pass Swyx's evals, and I didn't pay much attention to them. When I brought up our scheduling section, my heart sank. I got angry. It was the kind of software that I hate: it presented 24 talk slots, all pre-filled, each requiring the organizer (Ann) to undo it. This is like the ultimate "eff you" to users — that's 24 fields that someone has to undo. 24 clicks of mindless drudgery and meanness inflicted onto the poor organizer. (See first image.) So I put into Claude Fable the Ann interview transcripts and the video where it could see the screenshots, where she walked me thru how she has created conference schedules in the past. I told it to read the manifest we wrote for the project (e.g., no one likes filling out forms, no one likes switching pages, etc.) and had it create some design briefs. Within two hours, we replaced the awful scheduling grid full of hateful dropdown boxes with a sublime Trello-like experience. We could easily change the timeslots merely by changing a duration, and changes would ripple through the rest of the day. We could detect when slots infringed on hard boundaries (e.g., you can't move lunch because of the venue food/beverage staff, you can't change plenary times, because of union AV teams). We added the ability to add tags to talks, to encode information that we use to make scheduling decisions (e.g., opener/closer, enterprise experience report vs expert/consultant). In short, we published a production schedule the earliest we've ever done in our history, 20x faster than ever, with the lowest cost of change. And it's in production use, supporting two of our conferences already. Some reflections so far: - technically, the old terrible "make you undo 24 talk slots" that I created for you might have passed the evals -- but it would have been as bad than many of the tools that I've complained about for 10+ years. Tim O'Reilly famously said, when something becomes free, something else becomes more important — and as creating software becomes free, he predicted what becomes even more valuable is judgement and taste. - Eval-driven software development is going to change the world, and will allow us to clone SaaS products in a weekend — but the risk is that we recreate the hateful software products that we're replacing. It will be cheaper, but dooms users to the same hell they were stuck in before. (At least we're the warden, I suppose?) - That 68 people completed Swyx's challenge shows that there are certainly some categories of SaaS that you can replace in one weekend - There is another danger: great SaaS companies are now able to start moving into adjacent categories and start pushing out incumbents. (A great example from Enterprise AI Summit from April: Tisson Mathew, CEO of Skypoint, describe how they've 10x shipped more products in a quarter than they had in 6 prior years combined -- and they're moving into adjacent categories, easy displacing the incumbent, because they only needed a couple of features.) You can see our live schedule (created more easily than ever!) for our upcoming Enterprise AI Summit here! https://curtaincallcfp.com/program/enterprise-ai-summit-charlotte-2026 Images: old screen, new screen, design brief. Next post will show movie of the Trello-like scheduling experience we've been dreaming of for over a decade. So @swyx announced his “Kill My SaaS in one weekend” contest, where you could win 10K to replace his 40K/year SaaS. On Saturday morning, I learned that it was to replace their conference CFP software. OMG. I've run about 24 conferences over 12 years, but something I rarely talk…

Source: Swyx (X) | 2026-08-20