Dialect EngineeringSaaS architecture when code is cheap
Draft, September 2026

References

Every source the paper cites, by the section that cites it. 66 sources.

1. The premise that has been withdrawn

  1. Architecture Strategies for Catching the Long Tail
  2. The Salesforce Platform Multitenant Architecture
  3. Managing Technical Debt in Software Engineering
  4. Ramač et al., Journal of Systems and Software, 2022
  5. Dubinsky et al., CSMR 2013
  6. Wolfart et al., Journal of Systems and Software, 2024
  7. Besker, Martini and Bosch, Journal of Systems and Software, 2019
  8. The History of Salesforce
  9. Cloud Computing and SaaS as New Computing Platforms
  10. Cui et al., Management Science, 2026
  11. METR, 2025
  12. METR, 2026
  13. Building a C compiler with a team of parallel Claudes
  14. Run long horizon tasks with Codex
  15. Navigating the generative AI disruption in software
  16. Will Agentic AI Disrupt SaaS? · also section 4

2. Multi-tenancy as a line through a stack

  1. Silo, Pool, and Bridge Models
  2. Tenancy models for a multitenant solution
  3. Architectural approaches for the deployment and configuration of multitenant solutions
  4. Flow Basics
  5. The Workday business process framework
  6. Platform Multitenant Architecture
  7. Aulbach et al., SIGMOD 2008
  8. 2015 ERP Report

3. What the customer will ask for

  1. The 2026 ERP Report
  2. TechRepublic reporting Gartner Digital Markets
  3. Gartner, March 2025
  4. Gartner, June 2025
  5. Gartner, August 2025
  6. Use the Microsoft Dataverse Web API

4. Pricing what the customer assembles

  1. Zendesk pricing
  2. The 2019 Feature Adoption Report
  3. 2026 SaaS Management Index
  4. The State of B2B Monetization in 2025
  5. Gartner, July 2026
  6. Information used in BOM calculations with standard costs
  7. Accounting for Managers
  8. Ulrich, Research Policy, 1995
  9. Configurator glossary
  10. What Is CPQ?
  11. Hinterhuber, Journal of Business Strategy, 2008
  12. Bakos and Brynjolfsson, Bundling Information Goods, 1996
  13. Sticker Shock: Navigating Car Trim Levels
  14. Fin pricing: Outcomes
  15. Salesforce Unveils Agentforce
  16. Salesforce, May 2025
  17. Zendesk, August 2024

5. Two directions of travel

  1. Original Strangler Fig Application
  2. Strangler Fig pattern

6. Onboarding first

  1. Success by Design
  2. ERP implementation in six phases

7. Horizontal and vertical modernisation

  1. AI Coding Agents and DSLs

8. The knowledge graph as the starting inventory

  1. Semantic Engineering · also section 9

9. A grammar above the graph

  1. Are language workbenches dead?
  2. Reflections on the Lack of Adoption of DSLs
  3. Scholak et al., PICARD
  4. Semantic Layer vs. Text-to-SQL
  5. The Structured Output Benchmark
  6. The Constraint Tax

10. Configuration schema and grammar

  1. Grammar Prompting for DSL Generation

11. Degrees of freedom and what they cost

  1. mcp-token-benchmark
  2. Epoch AI

12. Verification moves from reading to running

  1. Catala
  2. scalable oversight, 2025
  3. ISDA Digital Regulatory Reporting

15. What the grammar demands

  1. Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code