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Reminds me of the story of when the Surgeon General (in the US) reported that smoking causes cancer.

People stopped smoking immediately, and cigarette sales tanked. The cigarette companies laughed (with all the phlegm in their throats and lungs) and sales came back 1-2 weeks later.

I suspect in a few months or a year companies with vibe-coded replacements for SaS products will find they need to go back: But, just like how many less people smoke today than in the past, the writing is clearly on the wall. At some point someone will figure out how to replace SaS with AI; it's just going to take a lot longer than many think.

Vibe coded SaaS is a SaaTA. Throw away.

I'd actually say the opposite is the case. B2B (even SaaS) is probably the most robust when it comes to AI resistance. The described "in house vibe coded SaaS replacement" does not mirror my experience in B2B at all. The B2B software mindset I've encountered the most is "We'll pay you so we don't have to wrestle with this and can focus on what we do. We'll pay you even more if we worry even less." which is basically the opposite of...let's have someone inhouse vibe code and push to production. B2B is usually fairly conservative.

It's a tale as old as time that developers, particularly junior developers, are convinced they could "slap together something in one weekend" that would replace expensive SAAS software and "just do the parts of it we actually use". Unfortunately, the same arguments against those devs regular-coding a bespoke replacement apply to them vibe-coding a bespoke replacement: management simply doesn't want to be responsible for it. I didn't understand it before I was in management either, but now that I'm in management I 100% get it.

I have few sticks in the sand in my thinking framework:

* writing code has always been the easiest part of building software, deciding what to do and what not to do is something else that takes forever sometimes

* there are several open source projects that can replace commercial SaaS and still people prefer to purchase commercial SaaS. These are available immediately, deployed immediately etc etc.

* along the same line, some of those open source projects offer self-hosting and cloud version: I would always personally go for the cloud version because in a small team I don't want to operate something that other people built and I don't know how to operate. That's not my job not my team job

* people are underestimating how draining is operating and maintaining software, which is something that goes beyond the adrenaline rush you get after "building" something with Lovable or similar tools. Also, I find it extremely easy to get 80% done quickly but excruciatingly slow to get things done right.

* I still see huge value in using tools like Lovable to build a working prototype and validate assumptions so that you get quickly build the right thing right solving the right problem in the right away avoiding waste

* camcorders have been around for ages but you don't have millions of directors around just because you make a tool more accessible

* same can be said for other things like restaurants, where sometimes it's more convenient (although expensive) to buy vs build.

1. This isn't rooted in data but anecdotes "One Series E CEO told me that they’re re-evaluating the quarterly renewal of their engineering productivity software because they along with an engineer reimplemented something using Github and Notion APIs. They were paying $30,000 to a popular tool3 and they were not going to renew anymore."

2. These anecdotes are about tech startups spend, not your <insert average manufacturing business>. Nor or they grounded in data that says "we interviewed 150 SMB companies and 40% of them have cancelled their SaaS subscriptions and replaced it with vibe coded tools"

3. "Analysts are writing notes titled “No Reasons to Own” software stocks." - there is just one analyst saying this: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/no-reasons-own-software-stock...

4. Most of these SaaS tech stocks have been trading at all time highs...this smells of "explain something very complex with a simple anecdote"

EDIT: Oh lol, the author has a vibe coding SaaS offering...there ya go.

I see that Software as a Service banked too much on the first S, Software. But really customers want the second S, the Service.

When you sell a service, it's opaque, customer don't really care how it is produced. They want things done for them.

AI isn't killing SaaS, it's shifting it to second S.

Customers don't care how the service is implemented, they care about it's quality, availability, price, etc.

Service providers do care about the first S, software makes servicing so much more scalable. You define the service once and then enable it to happen again and again.

I don't think it is killing SaaS. I have definitely had to extend my sales cycle when a potential customer vibe-coded a quick fix for a pain point that might have triggered a sale a few weeks earlier, but eventually the benefit delivered by someone else caring about the software as their entire mission really wins out over a feature here and there.

If you are selling SaaS consider that a vibe-coding customer is validating your feature roadmap with their own time and sweat. It's actually a very positive signal because it demonstrates how badly that product is needed. If they could vibe code a "good enough" version of something to get themselves unstuck for a week, you should be able to iterate on those features and build something even better in short order, except deployed securely and professionally.

Everyone's going to talk about how cool their custom vibe-coded CRM is until they get stuck in a failed migration.

> What they don’t know, though, is that a poorly architected system will fail, eventually. As every senior programmer (eventually) understands, our job is complex because we have to understand the relationships in the real world, the processes involved, and the workflows needed, and representing it in a robust way to create a stable system. AI can’t do that.

I have a strong feeling the future's going to look like this:

Company vibe codes to replace a SaaS.

Little do they know this creates a time bomb: fragile systems where fundamental architectural defects are papered over by humans who knew the underlying dynamics but didn't articulate them well enough during the initial "vibe-architecture," so they're forced to patching the "impedance mismatches" with data entry or with even more vibe coding.

Those humans are eventually laid off, because of course they are. Data quality rapidly deteriorates. Operational mishaps deteriorate relationships with human counterparties. Defects begin to cost thousands to millions.

Suddenly, there's demand: not for SaaS, but for actual service businesses. Consultancies that can parachute in, do actual domain-driven design, and un-vibe that code. They do have a stronger-than-ever pool of out-of-work engineers (many from the failed SaaS companies).

The SaaS companies that survive understand that the first S no longer stands for Software; it stands for Solutions.

I think one of the interesting things here is that AI doesn't need to be able build B2B SaaS to kill it. So much of the overhead of B2B SaaS companies is thinking about multitenancy, intergrating with many auth providers and mapping those concepts to the program's user system, juggling 100 features when any given customer only needs 10 of them, creating PLG upsell flows to optimize conversions, instrumenting A/B tests etc...

A given company or enterprise does not have to vibe code all this, they just need to make the 10 features with the SLA they actually care about, directly driven off the systems they care about integrating with. And that new, tight, piece of software ends up being much more fit for purpose with full control of new features given to company deploying it. While this was always the case (buy vs build), AI changes the CapEx/OpEX for the build case.

It’s about the "Per User Tax"

The panic over SaaS vs AI is simpler than people think. For years, we’ve been paying "Enterprise" prices for tools that are essentially just a UI on top of a database.

I'm a solution architect, and we recently looked at the $30/user/mo price tag for legacy test management tools. It’s insane. Why am I paying a "per user per month tax" for a glorified spreadsheet when I can pay $20 for an AI agent that can build me a custom version in a week?

So, we did exactly that. We used Claude and Cursor to "vibe-code" EZTest. A 100% open source, self hosted alternative that does 90% of what the expensive SaaS tools do, but with zero recurring fees and total data ownership.

The market is crashing because the "Application Layer" has been commoditized. If you can build and own your infrastructure for the cost of a few API calls, the era of renting basic software is over.

We aren't just building a tool; we're proving that the "SaaS Tax" is now optional.

> How to keep asking customers for renewal, when every customer feels they can get something better built with vibe-coded AI products?

Wrong take. You don't need to build something better, you only need something good enough that matches what you actually need. Whether you build it or not and ditch the SaaS is more of an economic calculus.

Also, this isn't much about ditching the likes of Jira not even mentioning open source jira clones exists from decades.

This is more of ditching the kind of extremely-expensive-license that traps your own company and raises the price 5/10% every year. Like industrial ERP or CRM products that also require dedicated developers anyway and you spend hundreds of thousands if not millions for them. Very common, e.g. for inventory or warehouse management.

For this kind of software, and more, it makes sense to consider in-housing, especially when building prototypes with a handful of capable developers with AI can let you experiment.

I think that in the next decade the SaaS that will survive will be the evergreen office suite/teams, because you just won't get people out of powerpoint/excel/outlook, and it's cheap enough and products for which the moat is mostly tied to bureaucratic/legal issues (e.g. payrolls) and you just can't keep up with it.

"For example, to create a data visualization I won’t seek any SaaS. I’ll just code one myself using many of the popular vibe coding tools (my team actually did that and it’s vastly more flexible than what we’d get off-the-shelf)."

That maybe doable in your 10-people startup, Namanyay. Try doing it in a larger organisation with layers upon layers of firewalls, databases, authentication systems and not the least importantly - management. Not to mention the vastly different audience, both in size and interest. Your own experience is not the experience of everyone else.

The term "B2B SaaS" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here and I think conflates two different things:

(1) Business model: hosted software you pay monthly for (vs self-hosted/one-time purchase)

(2) "Glue" products: tools like Monday.com that primarily provide synergy between data sources and workflows

The article is really about (2) - and yes, those are vulnerable to vibe-coding. If your product's core value is "we connect X to Y and show you a dashboard," that's now a weekend project.

But there's a huge category of SaaS where the value is in the product itself, not the integration layer. Take Excalidraw - fits the SaaS model, but try vibe-coding a collaborative whiteboard with real-time sync, proper data persistence, conflict resolution, export formats, etc. The hard problems aren't "connect API A to API B."

Or PostHog - sure you could vibe-code some analytics tracking, but building reliable event ingestion at scale, session replay, feature flags with proper rollout controls? That's years of engineering.

The "vibecodeable" SaaS products were always somewhat commoditized - AI just accelerated the timeline. The ones solving genuinely hard technical problems seem a lot safer to me.

I don't really agree with this.

Simple CRUD app sure, but we're nowhere near being able to vibe code even a relatively low-complexity enterprise SaaS product.

If it's got customer data in it and/or you're making important business decisions based on it, you really need your system to be accurate and secure. My experience is the people who procure enterprise software know this and tend to care a lot about it. They often have legal and contractual obligations around that.

In the 1990s there were people who thought OOP with point and click tools like FoxPro and Delphi would make it so easy to create software that everything could be built in-house without expert programmers. The invention of SQL was supposed to eliminate roles like Report Writer and Data Analyst because now business people could just write their own queries "in English" and get back answers.

Lots of companies buy saas, and then spend years customizing and effectively building what they thought they bought. And for big companies, it is costly - a few tens of millions for saas licenses, and maybe around 50-100m for system integrators leaching on the enterprise, and doing the integrations and customizations, usually dancing around the data model, api surface limitations of each of the saas tools they want to wire together.

I dont think going back to having own developers, owning the code is going to be a bad financial propositions for such companies. My company is now one month into trying this out and so far, so good. We kicked our outsystems addiction and are just went live with a react rewrite - and are well into rewriting an expensive to run document management system which we were at the same time under-utilizing and abusing. Our product people are loving it since for the first time in ages we dont need to tell them "well that would be real hard, considering we have salesforce crap underneath and it just doesnt do this or that well".

Maybe it's mostly from AI, maybe it's mostly general economic cutbacks. I also feel like these "wrapper" style SaaS products are the first ones companies are dropping when they are looking to cut costs, and I think a lot of companies are looking to cut costs. I do agree with the overall conclusion either way, that System of Record products/companies are the most likely to survive. There are a lot of SaaS companies with questionable long-term businesses who are getting hit, but that was bound to happen.

This isn't happening. The past six months has been rough on public B2B SaaS valuations, but the impact is a lot wider than just B2B SaaS (its all non-S&P10 software), and valuations are just vibes in the end. Most of these companies are, financially, doing pretty well; seeing key metric growth, including revenue and profit. This makes sense: AI does not fundamentally change the bargain SaaS brought to the table, that companies would rather pay someone to solve their problems than solve them themselves. However, the stock market doesn't care about this. The stock market doesn't care about anything; it behaves irrationally and non-sensically, and trying to derive any sense of how stable, strong, or successful a company is from stock market valuation is like using lines of code to claim that a software project is really good.

This feels a lot like the old RPA hype cycle to me — more sales narrative than structural change.

Most companies are not going to replace stable SaaS with a pile of AI-generated internal tools. They don’t want the maintenance or the risk.

If there’s a real B2B game changer, it’s Microsoft.

The day Excel gets a serious, domain-aware AI that can actually model workflows, clean data, and automate logic properly, half of these “build vs buy” debates disappear. People will just solve problems where they already work.

Excel has always been the real business platform. AI will just double down on that, not kill SaaS.

"The SaaS model was built on a simple premise: we build it once, you pay forever."

I've never seen a SaaS product that fits this description. There are always things to do. Libraries to upgrade, performance bottlenecks to diddle around with, an endless stream of nonsense feature requests from people at the customer who never actually use the product, fun experiments your developers want to try out, and so on.

The hard part in SaaS is to delete code, and that's what you should do, at least some of the time. Either through simplifications, or just outright erasing functionality that very few if any of your customers rely on.

What you should not do is let your customers grow the liability that is code in your production environment, unless your entire product set is designed to handle things like this, e.g. the business models of Salesforce and SAP.

It's not and I really doubt it will, for true SaaS platforms. A desktop .gif recorder (frequent example I've read about) is not a SaaS, even if you charge monthly for it.

Let's put an example an exception-tracking SaaS (Sentry, Rollbar). How do the economics of paying a few hundred bucks per month compare vs. allocating engineering resources to an in-house tracker? Think development time, infra investment, tokens, iteration, uptime, etc. And the opportunity cost of focusing on your original business instead.

One would quickly find out that the domain being replaced is far more complex and data-intensive than estimated.

What the authors of this kind of doomer-type articles do not realize is that B2B software companies have the data that their customers pay for, and they also have access to the AI tools themselves, meaning they can accelerate in adding new features to their products, making them more competitive.

It's a fallacy to consider the bad performance of software stocks as a definite sign that AI is going to replace them. One needs to factor financials into the equation to explain a downtrend. Take Figma for example, spending 109 mil on AWS bills, cutting through their margins. Investors know that such costs do not simply go down due to the vendor lock-in companies experience when using cloud services.

Claude Code is good, but definitely far away from being able to vibe code Figma.

Focus is a currency and you have a limited amount of it, if all SaaS is built internally, teams would go bankrupt. There's likely always going to be a band of experts focused on solving a problem and everyone pays them to solve it for them, because they do it better and can handle the hassle of maintaining it.

> AI is killing B2B SaaS

Anecdata sample size of one, but this is not my experience at all. My business has only continued to grow over the past couple years, and I don't think I've had a single customer mention AI to me at all (over the phone or email).

The framing is a bit dramatic but the underlying shift is real. What AI actually kills is the "wrap an API in a UI" SaaS model. If the value is just presenting data nicely or doing simple transformations, an agent can replace that.

What survives: products with proprietary data, strong network effects, or deep domain expertise baked into the workflow. The moat moves from "we built a UI" to "we understand this problem better than anyone."

I run 4 side projects and the ones getting traction aren't the ones with the fanciest AI features - they're the ones solving specific problems people have repeatedly (meal planning, meeting search). The AI is the engine, not the product.

The real risk for B2B SaaS isn't that AI replaces your product - it's that your customers can now build a "good enough" internal version in a weekend with Claude Code.

It really isn't. Nobody's migrating their payroll vendor to some vibecoded app. I agree with Jensen Huang that this reaction doesn't make sense at all.

My own prediction is that reliable vibecoding will be additive. It's a new capability that will help high-agency people do things faster or answer questions they couldn't easily answer before. Need to spin up a big custom Monte Carlo calculation and want a simple UI to control and configure it? You can just throw that together now. Need to get a draft budget allocation for a big set of projects calibrated against a set of conflicting constraints? Let an agent crank at it for a couple hours, then review and refine manually -- or just toss it out if you don't like it.

But building, running, and maintaining production-grade services or apps that the company relies on for its basic functioning? You're not just paying the SaaS vendor for having built the product -- you're paying them to maintain it, run it, and respond to issues promptly. You're also paying them to keep building it and improving it over time. To be clear, I think there are certainly cases where the rise of "coding AGI" is going to lead companies to build some services internally versus buying from a vendor, but I predict these will be highly custom and bespoke services that are too tailored for a specific corporation to make sense for a third-party vendor to try to sell.

AI isn't killing SaaS exactly, but instead of selling UIs, SaaS companies are going to have to focus on infrastructure and data. You have to host stuff somewhere, so there's an inescapable cost and transaction that has to take place. If businesses can pay one bill for infra + data management and get nice apps and stuff on top of that (without being locked in), that makes more sense than trying to roll stuff together even if you have a platform team.

It's the opposite IMHO. AI is enabling a lot more B2B SaaS. There are a lot of companies that are running on outdated software. Especially in manufacturing and industry. They've had decades of experience with very expensive IT projects where cost got out of hand because things just are very complicated in the real world.

There are many millions of companies that are going to be re-examining if they can do better in the next years. The work will still be very complicated but with the help of AI, small IT shops might just deliver enough value to be worth the trouble.

The notion of e.g. busy floor plant/logistics managers vibe coding this themselves is silly. 1) they don't have the time; these people are super busy 2) they lack the ability. 3) they'll want it done properly 4) their employers won't skip all the certifications, iso stuff, and what not.

Companies invest in SAAS software if it delivers some kind of revenue/profit benefits. If it's too expensive/complex, it can't do that. AI tools lower the cost of SAAS solutions. So the totally addressable market grows. Companies will want to maximize their ROI though. So, they'll do the usual and engage software companies and integrators to help them do this. They'll expect to pay less for more. And there will be lots of haggling around that topic. But there's an enormous amount of companies that are quite far behind on getting their operations into this century in terms of IT already. There are going to be early adopters looking for early successes here that will put pressure on their competitors if they are successful.

I'm running a small company in this space. We're seeing a lot of opportunities right now. And AI is making my work massively easier already. All those complex ERP integrations just became an order of magnitude easier to do with a small team. They are still hard though. Forget about vibe coding that. You need a plan.

It’s not as far-fetched as people think. I see so many comments here doubting you can vibe code a full CRM or e-commerce SaaS, but a skilled AI-assisted programmer absolutely can, especially if they're aware of strong open-source alternatives already out there.

For Salesforce-like CRM, there's Twenty[0], a good-enough alternative. For Shopify-style e-commerce, Medusa[1] is a headless commerce platform.

The real power comes from using AI to study how these projects implement specific features (payments, inventory, customer dashboards, etc.) and adapt them to your stack. AI excels at finding the "seams" (those connection points where a feature ties into the tech stack) and grasping the full implementation. The trick is knowing precisely where the feature lives in the code (files, functions, modules), because AIs often miss scattered pieces otherwise. That's what I'm building at opensource.builders[2]: turning OSS repos into a modular cookbook with structured "skills" that point to exact details for reliable remixing and porting.

SaaS companies are forever beholden to raising their market cap, even in solved spaces like cart, payment processing, and CRMs. Most businesses run on CRUD apps anyway, and if your core app exposes an API, you can build any customization you need on top of it. People here discounting how valuable it is for a business to have the software that runs their business on a tech stack they understand and something they truly own.

[0] https://github.com/twentyhq/twenty

[1] https://github.com/medusajs/medusa

[2] https://opensource.builders

Salesforces market cap today is 180,35B. That, not the change, is the market's judgement of how valuable salesforce is, despite any risk from AI. If salesforce stock drops with a new AI model that doesn't mean that investors think salesforce is worthless. It means a slight risk to their business is getting priced in.

Just because it's possible to build equivalent software by vibe coding doesn't necessarily mean that companies will stop using SaaS. There are multiple reasons why...

First of all, many big companies pay a fortune to use inferior SaaS solutions instead superior Open Source solutions; possibly because one of their CTO may have received kickbacks or promises of a lucrative job at the SaaS provider as a consequence of this deal. There are a lot of politics going on behind the scenes when it comes to procurement.

Execs at big corporations are often looking for plausible ways to spend investors' money in a way that they can capture some of it for themselves. If they choose open source or they choose cheap vibe coded solutions; there is not much money changing hands. No opportunities for insiders to covertly monetize.

And then there are a lot of security implications to using a complex vibe coded app. The AI won't be able to identify the vulnerability in any decent sized codebase unless you know what you want it to look for.

Lets break this down. There is very little in newness in what Anthropic announced. Claude had skills for a long time. They have added one more layer of abstraction and called it plugins. This mainly comes with a set of integrations.

Thats the pitch.

But, what are Claude plugins?

Plugins=Commands+Skills+Integrations.

Commands are specific to Claude code. But commands and skills are nothing but prompts at their basest level.

So what is the main differentiator?

Integrations.

But what are you integrating with?

SaaS companies.

And what is the stock market doing?

Dumping SaaS stocks.

How do they think Claude cowork will work without the integrations. Without the system of records.

If anything, these SaaS products have become more important. If I was a trading guy, I would go to the github of claude plugins, see the default integrations and buy the stock of those companies.

Lot of places that I see AI disrupting - I'm not buying that SaaS is going to be a significant one.

Reading through the article:

> They were paying $30,000 to a popular tool3

Couple things we needed to understand here:

  - How large is the client company
  - Is that $30,000/month or day or hour....

If it's a technology company of > 1000 employees - then $30,000 month doesn't even get Finance's attention. And there is next to zero chance that anyone is going to vibe-code, deploy, support and run anything in a 1000 person+ company for $30,000 a month. SaaS wins hands down.

Any product/service that people care about comes with a pager rotation - which is 6-7 employees making > $200k/year. If you can offload that responsibility to a SaaS for < $1mmm/year - done deal.

I don't see that happening because companies need to concentrate on their differentiators. Is your enterprise vibe coding its own SaaS? Who's taking care of it?

It seems like 'the market' is making this bet. I'm not deep into financial reports or whatever. But what I'm seeing from the tech side, this is not at all true.

If anything B2B SaaS is growing with AI, and it hasn't even begun, the biggest AI markets right now are personal. The B2B market is up for grabs for sure, 0%-1% of niches have an LLM product right now. But traditional SaaS has a huge advantage, they have reams of industry specific data, and they have the customers, sure they will have competition, but they are the incumbents.

If I had any money I'd buy the dip

Here is the list of evidence the author gives for why AI is the reason software company stocks are down:

Sure its fun to (vibe) code some internal version for a SaaS, but maintain it month after month? Maintain SLAs, etc? That's not fun.

Vibe coding gives you that dopamine hit of creation, but does the internal dev really want to deal with the care and feeding of the random shitty timesheet app they created?

Do they want to take on the work of integrating random backend systems that timesheet system needs to talk to? Do they want to get called at 3AM when it's down?

Even AI assisted, living year after year with production systems is hard.

Boy that "st" ligature in the subheading font is eye-catching, to the point of distraction.

How corporate incentives are aligned will also define the trajectory. The person who is going to take the call whether to go for vibe coded tool or external vendor has to have enough incentive to put this neck on the line.

Imagine this, you are VP of finance. You know you can get a nice tax calculator built quickly using vibe coding, but will you put your neck on the line and say, let's replace the existing vendor and use my vibe coded tool. You might fired if you send a wrong tax report to your auditor.

Let's take another example - VP of sales wants performance report and visuazliation of the sales team. He has 200 BDRs. The daily sales standup depends on this report, team gets yelled at or praised basis this. Now, will this VP be willing to put his neck on the line and say - let's use my vibe coded report and discard the existing SaaS. Even if such a report feels trivial, it is vital for functioning the sales team and hence, it needs to be reliable.

I think vibe coding will work at prototype level - the trust gap is very huge right now to even consider it for internal tools.

And, until vibe coded tools are stress tested enough this trust gap will not be fulfilled. Think about this, why some of the biggest companies in the world still run on softwares built in 2000s.

Previously on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46268452

This was the same hype around NoCode a few years ago. Thing is people for software as a service and internal teams dont want to do the service part. A common thread among all of the vibe coded stuff I hear is that nobody talks about the next requirement which was handled. Frankly UIs are learnable and after a few tries everybody gets used to it. The extra polish is totally not worth it. Eventually every SaaS on the non-critical business path gets ripped out with one of the platform players such as SAP, SalesForce etc which are infinitely customizable. Salesforce even has its own language in which customers write their apps.

The system of record bit is quite correct and imo the only durable advantage. But that doesnt explain why Klaviyo shoyld worry. In fact marketing workflows are some of the most important systems of record directly tied to business earnings.

The assumtpion that in SaaS you build once and everybody uses it is false. There are always customizations or features that need to be built for big contracts. Its the small players that are okay with out of the box SaaS since they lack the budget to pay for a customization. Ironically, these teams will get hurt the most should they choose to go down the vibe code everything path. Here infra capex is far lower than payroll and owning too much software (vibe coded or not) will simply steal time from business development.

Honestly, the market just panicked and caused a temporary correction thats all. Then we all got busy and wrote a bunch of thought leadership crap on top.

In reality AI is the best thing to happen to SaaS companies since it reduces RnD time and expenses, allows even small players to bid for large contracts without overloading existing dev capacity and also makes it possible to put devs in front of customers since now there's no need to sit down and code. AI is also the best thing to happen to engineering since it now allows for product management to be folded into the existing craft.

> build once, sell the same thing again ad infinitum, and don’t suffer any marginal costs on more sales.

Unless you consider customer acquisition cost. Not considering cost of sales is one of the big mistakes software developer entrepreneurs make.

I think people here need to accept that software is becoming electricity, you get charged when you use it and by how much. You don't pay for a box shaped electricity or purple color electricity, it is just electricity.

Build infra heavy saas. Somehow can get through. Llm will get better only, and people start copying every sucessfull platforms.

This feels like it started out being written by a human

but around the point "2. Security, authentication, and robustness" the LLM took over and finished it...

I think there may be other factors killing SaaS, particularly data sovereignty.

"According to IDC’s Future Enterprise Resiliency and Spending Survey from June 2025, 45% of all organizations and 56% of “digital natives” cited data sovereignty and potential cloud changes as their greatest concern for 2026."

https://www.veeam.com/blog/saas-data-sovereignty-microsoft-3...

> we have to understand the relationships in the real world, the processes involved, and the workflows needed, and representing it in a robust way to create a stable system. AI can’t do that.

That is because AI is living in our world, instead of the opposite where we live in AI's world.

Case in point: maybe the AI hallucinated a class method that never existed in our world yet, but perhaps in the AI led processes and workflows it would be written to better fit into the smooth gradient decent those same top parameters' scores.

Great insights Namanyay!

I feel the same way about needing to build platforms that enable companies to build on top. That's why i'm building adventureflow.ai to enable energy companies to build their agentic workflows directly on top of my platform.

The expectations have completely changed now, customers expect more software for less, because it is 5-10x cheaper now or faster to build and there's no changing that. Tools like Opus 4.5 have completely disrupted the software marketplace!

As a founder, there is another angle here that is worth mentioning. Not only does AI B2B SaaS allow insourcing, it also allows there to be 10x (imaginary number) the number of companies building SaaS for the same use case. What we see in healthcare or finance for example is executive fatigue from demos, in many cases mostly vibe coded frontend UIs that entrepreneurs are using to test the market. This creates friction for businesses / SaaS companies that are unable to show how their solution is unique, well built or has a clear moat over the many others they have seen.

While the author is wildly overstating things, I do think AI is striking at the heart of the SaaS problem, which is the business model of "pay us $10-100+ per employee per month in perpetuity or we will hold all your data and your company's operations hostage". There is always going to be value in good software, but it is shitty vendors relying on the lock-in effect that are in danger. And good riddance.

The other issue is valuations - B2B SaaS stocks have never been rooted in reality, and the 100+ P/E ratios were always going to come down to earth at some point.

Saas companies will survive for the same reason they do today. The operational overhead of any sufficiently complicated piece of software is too much, even more so if it's vibe coded.

I didn't realize B2B SaaS products were in freefall like his numbers suggest. I'm not convinced customers are leaving to vibe code their own products but I do believe we're seeing a major shift in the market, pushed by the sudden relative ease of coding. There are a lot of B2B SaaS products which are outdated and I wouldn't be surprised if they're supplanted by much faster competition

There is no evidence presented that internally "vibe coded" products are the reason hubspot et al are struggling right now. If anything, the fact that the divergence from the broader index starts in April of last year (well before the current vibe coding moment got going) is evidence that this is something else.

“Killing” is a bit strong, but is there a world where folks just vibe code solutions that they would have bought previously? Absolutely and and I think that world is here now.

I’ve seen many startups recently were it was like “guys I could vibe code your ‘product’ in the afternoon.” Yes someone needs to look after it etc, but the bar on where companies buy vs build is getting much, much higher.

(Insert rant from dev teams about the code sucks, who will maintain it, etc). Yes all valid points, but things are changing regardless of if folks like it or not.

The keyword in "Software as a Service" is not Software; it's the Service.

In the early days, the tagline for Salesforce is "No Software". It's secret recipe is this: your sales team only need a browser and a credit card, to get the service. No software installation needed. Even if you have a genius can code something equivalent, it will never be a "service". That genius is not going to support it, not going to add storage for you, not going to restore an accidentally deleted record for you. That takes an army to deliver. It is a service.

Of course, Marc Benioff kind of shot himself in the foot by trying to get ahead of the AI curve... and gutted their customer service division. If the service is delivered by AI agents, what is the selling point again over other AI agents? They have debased their key strengths and are getting punished for it.

One problem with centrally produced and distributed software is that a small subset of users demanding certain features results in feature bloat for everyone. Costs for all features are shared by all users.

Probably one way SaaS companies will adapt is to break up their offerings into more modular low cost components. While many customers will end up paying less, the addressable market will probably increase because of the new low cost options.

Vibe coding seems to be the iPhone camera to DSLR moment for programming.

- No professional used an iPhone for years. Most don’t today.

- Professional scoffed at it as a toy

- The toy shifted the balance of volume through everyday enablement of amateurs to a degree that professional were right, but now in a severely lopsided terrain.

The value ends up in the most engaged paradigm, rather than the most perfect one.

I was reading through the article and waiting for the key info to drop, but nope. It never did. It seemed like marketing fluff. If anything, vibe coding may eliminate some of the B2C SaaSes, but not B2B. If you think an enterprise is going to vibe code a B2B offering that they pay millions for, you're out of your mind.

Here's my general mantra regarding AI: NEVER take suggestions about AI from people who have a vested interest in it. CEOs of companies that train and offer LLMs, Authors of Books about LLMs and AI in general, etc.

This may come off as an unpopular opinion, but this is how I felt after listening to Steve Yegge recently. He has a new book about Vibe coding and he goes on in the interview/podcast to say that the best programmers he knows in the world (the ones better than him and maybe even the top world class programmers), would be equivalent to those of interns in an year, if they don't start vibe coding or use AI. I respect the guy, but damn, this is just peak delusion. He didn't even say it as a hyperbole, he meant it.

According to popular CEOs of companies training LLMs, 2024 was supposed to be the year that would eliminate the need for Junior and mid-level engineers. 2025 happened. Now, we are in 2026.

So yeah, I'm never taking advice about AI from these people ever again.

Wow, the tails on the lowercase letter 't' throughout that article are distracting.

Are there real documented cases of a company replacing their SaS with a vibe-coded version?

Like I can see how a very small company could replace a portion of an overkill and underutilized SaS platform.

I don’t see how a larger more complex business could replace their SAP or ADP with a vibecoded version.

These stories are all very similar in where the author knows some CEO of an obscure company who told them they had an engineer reverse engineer and vibecode some obscure SaS solution and saved them $50K.

SaaS dying is mostly nonsense.

Which is easier to vibecode - AI agent or Salesforce?

The fragmentation in the AI agent space will be markedly larger than at the base CRM layer.

Abd the AI agent is replaceable in under a minute but your data in Salesforce isn’t.

I just don't buy it.

Most people who've been in a business SaaS environment know that writing the software is relatively the easy part aside from in very difficult technical domains. The sales cycle + renewals and solution engineering for businesses is the majority of the work, and that's going nowhere.

The framing of 'vibe coding replaces SaaS' misses the more interesting shift: the value SaaS provided was never really the software — it was workflow automation. Software was just the best delivery mechanism we had.

What's changing is that agents + APIs are becoming a better delivery mechanism for many workflows than a UI you manually operate. A company paying $50k/year for a marketing analytics dashboard doesn't actually want a dashboard — they want answers about what's working. An LLM with API access to their data sources often delivers that faster than navigating someone else's opinionated interface.

The SaaS most at risk isn't infrastructure (Stripe, Twilio) or systems of record (Salesforce, Workday). It's the 'pretty UI on top of data you already own' tier — analytics, reporting, simple automation, basic CRM. That's where the compression happens. The products that survive will be the ones that become the system of record, or that offer value AI genuinely can't replicate (regulatory compliance, deep integrations with legacy systems, etc).

Or maybe there is look at true value proposition of the B2B SaaS products. It is not big spend per user, but it does add up eventually. And then savings start to look like big numbers. Big enough for some manager to justify action. This might lead cutting some seats just on cost basis.

Are B2B sales actually impacted or is the stock market just randomly predicting AI will impact B2B and selling off?

Since when does stock price / valuation have to match actual business realities?

I predict the fallout from this is companies being nickel & dimed to death by a million smaller subscriptions (rather than just cutting a huge check to Workday, ServiceNow, SAP, Oracle or similar). There is such a glut of AI ISV startups that are filling highly specific niches, and some are quite good, but they're all usually in the $10-50/mo/user. Gets to be big numbers pretty quickly in a large enterprise.

AI, as do most things, help the big players get bigger. If someone is automating small parts of the b2b layer they get dropped, but it’s harder to drop an automation that companies are used to. I don’t see how AI is changing that, companies spent a lot of time and money to set up the automation because it’s needed and because they can write a potential replacement cheaply doesn’t mean they are going to rip away something that works and is reliable.

I used to be a big advocate for Salesforce in my organization. And it was really great .. allowing us to deliver new functionality without the usual IT procurement bureaucracy.

Now with cloud maturity and Vibe coders who will get better and cheaper, I think it's possible to replace all the features we use on Salesforce at a fraction of the cost of our Salesforce licensing cost.

I am kind of hoping that AI will kill the startup grab for money TBH. Too many wannabe CEOs I've met in the past 2 decades have gotten rich thanks to a lucky pitch without a clear path to a viable product. At least 6 of those I know did so at the expense of developers that accepted equity over cash...and the developers wasted a ton of time and 2 even were briefly homeless as a result...and none of them live in California.

Hopefully wannabe senior leadership will try and take advantage of AI without taking advantage of developers, because most of us just want to write code and build something great.

Customers don't want to pay for rolodex + 8000-data-point-visulization + integrated-automatic-contact-form-filling + assisted-real-time-closest-contact-scanning + 15 new-features-months + Annual-UI-rewrites + All-that-amazing-businesses-functionality-for-only-$199/usr/mo.

They want AI to vibecode a rolodex. And just use that. For 30 years if needed. 2000 LOC and a one time $20 cost.

The cancer of SaaS cannot die fast enough.

Well it definitely killed mine so I can't say this is not true

Maybe the type of SaaS that's akin to stock media (photos, video, music). Just hard enough to do from scratch, but not important enough that it needs to be exceptional in it's field. I've made some money off software like that, and it was nice, but I always knew it couldn't last. Better developers took most of it from me years ago.

It's this generation's "build vs buy." I imagine it will play out the same way, like a revolving door. Customers churn because they can "build it themselves," then a year later when they're sick of maintaining a mess of code for some internal system instead of delivering value to their own customers, they come back. A blip.

With a new agentic-lashup tearing across the internet every week, pointing the way to "gradient descent" software development, any purchasing manager worth their salt is going to ask some serious questions about their enormous SaaS bill before committing to another expensive long term contract. It follows that valuations must decline. Even if only because risks to moats have increased, but also because it makes sense to negotiate hard on pricing when there's fear in your counterparty.

Not sure about that, however agents in low code tools are certainly taking over old school integrations.

here's the secret saas can vibe code features too on top of their paid well developed and secured api. they can get off their ass and vibe code a mcp wrapper, so user can use the ai tooling they pay for to interact with their saas. and they'd be called visionary hero of the agentic revolution.

but they don't want to. and they will be replaced, as it's good and well.

Sure, vibe coding has impacted user's expectations. They know you can ship a new update easier and faster than before - and you actually can.

But, not sure which successful SaaS companies just stopped shipping any updates to the product, never talked to their customers and never added any new features to win over major new accounts - and still managed to survive and thrive?

And the author actually confirms this:

> AI isn’t killing B2B SaaS. It’s killing B2B SaaS that refuses to evolve.

I would assume one major thing here is that many orgs only need a small subset of functionality from what most products provide. Many times, that small subset of functionality is only "good enough" in and of itself, but the org is paying the premium for the entire suite of whatever it is. This makes realizing that an LLM can get them to MVP and beyond much easier.

Charging hundreds of thousands if not millions per year for very basic functionality is what is "killing" b2b SaaS.

We will have to go through the stage of disillusionment of what AI is and understanding of what it is not. There is too much FOMO and too many stories driven by the heavy-AI-invested parties today to see thing clearly.

The real story isn't that some enterprise mega corp is going to vibe-code their own Workday.

The real story is that SOME startups made up of one person (or small number of engineers) will do it, and create pricing pressures against Workday, or DocuSign, or other B2B SaaS.

It kills low hanging fruit SaaS that was always just some minor piece of functionality wrapped in a subscription model usually based on 99% open source and 1% actual contribution.

Sounds like a lot of products will be in trouble if AI becomes more advanced with producing secure code with maintenance processes to keep evaluating code on an ongoing basis

Something notable for SaaS which this article doesn't mention is that in some cases the reason to buy rather than make yourself is due to needing to handle a bunch of different regulations which LLMs don't threaten (barring businesses which would rather have lawsuits than pay for a SaaS).

there is no saas downturn caused by AI. wall street is just starting to say hang on a minute, why is this SaaS stock trading at a price to earnings ratio of 300?

then the sell-off is attributed to AI because it is far easier to say to shareholders hey we know our company lost half its value but thats actually a good thing because we need to pivot to AI and we're going to spend all our free cash flow on AI software and our stock should totally be trading at 300x earnings again in a few weeks. if you can last another few months as CEO and the fed cuts rates you'll be able to ride it out

of course, the tide is going out on a few dogs. I don't think adobe will become dominant again

you see the same trend with mass-layoffs being blamed on AI. easy way to sell bad news to the shareholders

in 2026, AI and JE are the two reasons for absolutely everything

It is obvious.

A middle 100-500 heads firm don't need enterprise level SaaS, a vibe coded website will suit them better.

Fundamentally, those workflow/orchestration SaaS needs to answer the question why people should pay you premium while only getting 80% where they want to be.

Anybody who says this doesn't understand build vs buy, and why companies buy in the first place, or they'll selling AI.

For the most part, you can replicate any B2B SaaS product in a spreadsheet. The same reasons why spreadsheets didn't kill B2B SaaS apply to "in house vibe coded SaaS replacements." The original in house apps are (and continue to be) spreadsheets.

Can't wait for the "AI Is supercharging SAAS" article when the stocks go up, and another "SAAS IS DEAD" when they go down again

Anyone can learn to cook, and the barrier to entry is low. There's no shortage of restaurants though.

I don't think AI is killing B2B SaaS so much as companies are finally reckoning with the immense costs of SaaS in a markably different environment than when SaaS exploded in popularity, and AI offers an off-ramp to some. Let's break it down camp-by-camp to show you what I mean:

1) The must-haves. These are your email and communication systems, the things you absolutely have to have up and available at all times to do business. While previously self-hosted (Exchange/Sendmail, IRC/Skype/Jabber, CallManager/UCS), the immense costs and complexities of managing systems ultimately built on archaic, monolithic, and otherwise difficult-to-scale technologies meant that SaaS made sense from a cost and a technical perspective. Let's face it, the fact nobody really hosts their own e-mail anymore in favor of Proton/Microsoft/Google/et al shows that self-hosting is the exception here, not the norm - and they're not going anywhere regardless of how bad the economy gets. These are the "housing stock" of business, and there's plenty of cheap stock always available to setup shop in without the need for technical talent.

2) The juggernauts. The, "we can do this ourselves, but the pain will be so immense that we really don't want to". This is the area where early SaaS solutions cornered and exploded in growth (O365, ServiceNow, Google Workspaces), because managing these things yourself - while feasible, even preferable - was just too cheap to pass up having someone else wrangle on your behalf with a reasonable SLA, freeing up your tech talent for all the other stuff. The problem is that once-focused products have become huge behemoths of complex features that most customers neither need nor use on a regular basis, at least after the initial pricey integration. Add in the ease of maintainability and scalability brought by containers or microservices, along with the availability and reliability of public cloud infrastructure, and suddenly there's more businesses re-evaluating their relationships with these products in the face of ever-rising prices. With AI tooling making data exfiltration and integration easier than ever from these sorts of products, I expect businesses to start consolidating into a single source of truth instead of using dozens of specific product suites - but not toppling any outright.

3) The nice-to-haves. The Figmas, the HubSpots, the myriad of niche-function-high-cost SaaS companies out there making up the bulk of the market. Those whose products lack self-hosted alternatives risk having vibe-coded alternatives be "good enough" for an Enterprise looking to slash costs without regard to long-term support or quality; those who compete with self-hosted alternatives are almost certainly cooked, to varying degrees. If AI tooling can crank out content similar in quality to Figma and the company has tech talent to refine it for long-term use, why bother paying for Figma? If AI tooling can crank out a CRUD UI for users that just executes standard REST API calls behind the scenes, then why bother paying for fancy frontends? While it's technically interesting and novel at how these startups solved issues around scaling, or databases, or tenancy, the reality is that a lot of these niche products or services could be handled in-house with a container manager, a Postgres instance, and a mid-level IT person to poke it when things go pear-shaped. The higher per-seat prices of a lot of these services make them ripe for replacement in businesses comfortable with leveraging AI for building solutions, and I expect that number to grow as the tools become more widely available and IT-friendly in terms of security.

Ultimately, the core promise of SaaS to business customers was all the functionality with none of the costs of self-hosting support. Nowadays, many of them have evolved into solutions that are more expensive than self-hosted options, and businesses that have shifted IT into public clouds or container-based systems have realized they can do the same thing for less themselves, at the cost of some UI/UX niceties in the process. Now that we (IT) can crank out integrations with local LLMs with little to no cost, we're finally able to merge datasets into singular pools or services - and I'm not talking about Snowflake or its "big data" ilk so much as just finally getting everything into Salesforce or ServiceNow without having to bring in consultants.

The must-haves and many of the juggernauts will remain - for now. It's the niche players that need to watch their moats.

The reason for divergence is actually much simpler. NASDAQ 100 includes data center builders, Morgan Stanley software index doesn't. Stock market is going down across the board if you exclude data center construction.

People have been debating what "real" development is for as long as there have been computers. "That's not real software development, you're not even controlling which registers you use!" "How can you say that's real code when you aren't even managing your own memory!" "That doesn't look like C, must not be code!" and on and on.

At the level of the old adage about whether the horse-drawn buggy-makers are in the buggy business or the transportation business, it's all telling the computer what to do in the context of providing a customized tool that you or others might use. So in this context, a customized Excel spreadsheet counts. And so does a vibe-coded app.

And of course, wringing our hands about what it looks like now totally ignores the fact that it's not going to be like this for more than a year or two at most.

How long until a user can reasonably say to Claude or similar, "I need Bob here to track production at my factory. Lay out a set of tools to do that, and make sure they're layered with help and tutorials so Bob can learn on the job because he doesn't know anything. Don't let him make any mistakes."

That's probably not coming next year, but certainly it's not ten years away.

Maybe the new SaaS is to build vibe coding (aka conversation) into whatever you’re offering.

Jellyfish is a Jolly Fish, also invertebrate

I wouldn't see it positive that we just need to rethink and offer platforms. As this platforms already exist Azure, AWS, GCP

Maybe things will finally go full circle and people/companies will restart self-hosting their infrastructure instead of farming out everything.

Until Claude Code comes with indemnity insurance for HIPAA / GDPR / etc… B2B SaaS is here to stay. You want me to convince my auditor that the vibe-coded in house software handles PII correctly?

Making the audit someone else’s problem is 90% of the ‘buy’ value in ‘build vs buy’

Remember when businesses ran on cobbled together access databases and vb? It was easier than building something ny prompting an llm.I made a good living just rewriting those things for them when they fell apart.

Look, software is not going away even though everybody thinks they're a developer now. Do you think companies are going to replace Microsoft Windows, of which there are a billion installs, or Salesforce, Crowdstrike, Quickbooks etc, with some Vibe coded AI slop an intern "coded"?

When enterprises/businesses in general upgrade any software in the company it takes years sometimes... There is also Vendor lock in, you can't just swap things with vibe-coded slop, and trust me your manager will never want to do that either because his butt will be on the line.

That’s cool. I’m building a mob programmer.

Be a System of Record, not just a Wrapper™ is excellent advice.

no. High interest rates and a cautionary view of future economic growth are killing B2B SaaS. Money is no longer free, and so there is a bigger push for cost-cutting rather than growing your buisness with free money.

I wouldn't say that AI is killing B2B SaaS, let's analyze the situation: AI is shifting the boundaries of the Build VS Buy decision.

If software is cheaper... building it seems a much better option but... ...the fact that software is cheaper means that SaaS companies will be able to be more competitive with price, offering more features, integrating them much better with the newest agentic tools and frameworks that are getting released.

Sure, the market will adjust, some will be pushed away, others will find businesses that weren't possible before... but we're far away (I hope) from the AGI revolution, don't forget to see this crysis as an opportunity too.

Having worked in enterprise B2B SaaS for a long time, almost every feature I built could have been a simple spreadsheet or some emails. So I'm highly skeptical AI is going to change anything.

Enterprise sales basically works like this: A non-technical sales team aggressively promises everything to win a deal to a non-technical procurement or exec team. When the deal is won, the SaaS sales team tells engineers "go build this" regardless of how stupid it is. And the customer tells their employees "you now have to use this SaaS" regardless of whether it makes sense.

I know this is petty but I stopped reading when I saw the “c-t” ligature in the article headings. Obnoxious and pretentious.

Slight tangent: what’s the deal with the weird ligatures on that page in the headings?

AI isn't killing B2B SaaS. It's killing the service economy. Perhaps, the correct term, technically, is just shrinking it to very very small fraction.

I've worked in SaaS for most of my career, only recently working at a big corp who is largely the buyer and user of SaaS tools to meet their objectives. From the perspective of the corp business buyer, they want something that works for their needs and they want to buy something instead of build it because the support costs are gnarly. They already have engineers dedicated to the tools they've purchased. Much better to put the risk on someone else they can yell at. And the permissions and access to these tools, reports, data, is usually its own special problem to manage. Building a lot of one-off tools is going to just give IT a huge headache and they will push the org to buy before vibe coding a solution.

the procurement bypass was the best part. now watching ai devs ship faster than our salesforce admin could configure flows

at last, TrueAnon has arrived at hackernews

The trick is to build stuff that is hard to vibe code

The survival advice here — 'be a system of record,' 'make switching painful with compliance' — is exactly the playbook that makes customers want to leave in the first place. The deeper question is whether vibe-coded replacements will rot fast enough to send people running back, or whether AI gets good enough to maintain them too.

Time will tell.

At the end of the day you do not need to replace your B2B SaaS with AI.

You need your B2B SaaS to think you can use AI to replace it though, so said SaaS will keep it's prices reasonable. Otherwise they have you by the balls and will charge you much as humanly possible.

If that would be true, expect in the next decade a frantic search for seclusive grey beards, those who haven't given up their rituals and ancient languages.

If your workforce is vibing all day, they will have no capacity for maintenance, because it isn't their code. So the maintenance that happens will be slop and more spaghetti. I am not saying cases like that never existed before, but such companies will face a moment of truth sooner or later.

A link shortener is such an easy thing to code, it's essentially one database table with a redirect. To add to that, there are many open source libraries to implement link shortening, including analytics and stuff. Even then Bitly and Rebrandly have customers (from their website) like Toyota, Cisco, Oracle, Monday.com, New York Times, etc.

Are these companies unable to build a link shortener? It's also so easy to migrate off shortener service. If they can and still choose to use these shortening services, there must be other reason. And that reason is that they simply don't want to. This has nothing to do with AI.

I run a software company and one of the reasons customers say they want to migrate from their homegrown spreadsheet is because the guy who built it left. A freaking spreadsheet!

Such blog posts and probably many comments here are the perfect answer to "Tell me you don't run a real business without telling me you don't run a real business"

No.. just.. no. This will be a thing for like 1, maybe 2 years, then people will realise it doesn’t make sense to spend $50K of time per annum to replace a $500/month subscription for a better product.

AI is killing this. Millennials are killing that. Gen Z certainly must be killing another thing. And Yarn? It was killing NPM. This nonsense type of title really was made for a world where nuance doesn’t exist.

B2B SaaS is projected to grow over the next decade, not shrink. Just use the LLMs and you’ll be reminded of the value provided by the company selling non-core but important tools for your business.

Just a single data point, and I‘m not pretending it’s a conclusive one (yet), but I think there is a middle ground between buying a SaaS and vibe coding a replacement: replacing a SaaS with your own solution, using AI coding agents — while actually knowing what you do because creating robust software in-house is already a core competency. No vibe coding needed.

At my company, we build software every day because our business is running a job board.

We always had kind of an impedance mismatch when it comes to creating content pages (think landing pages for marketing).

Yes, we can do this ourselves, but then software engineering resources are in conflict between shipping the next feature and creating landing pages.

So we introduced Webflow. Now marketing could create their content themselves. Did it match our corporate identity? Hopefully. Was it technically sound? Sometimes. Was it fun for software engineers to fix things in Webflow. No.

It kind of worked, but wasn’t exactly ideal.

Meanwhile, software engineering became more and more productive with the advent of AI coding agents, Cursor in our case.

So we tried another approach: giving our content creators Cursor.

But that was brittle, too: Cursor presents an overwhelming complex UI for someone who never used an IDE before, it could do a thousand things while only three are actually needed in this use case, you have to explain git on top of Cursor. It kind of worked, but only kind of.

So we sat down and built https://dx-tooling.org/sitebuilder/

It’s like a hyper-focused „Cursor light“ in the browser, so our content creators can just „chat away“ and create their content pages, with all the guardrails baked into the product. Getting tracking pixel integration etc. right just works. Matching our style guide perfectly just works.

And as a bonus, there is a whole git based storage and versioning workflow underneath, so software engineering can support and test and deploy the results with their preferred tools and methods, but none of this complexity leaks through to the content creators.

We built this ourselves in days, not months, thanks to Cursor, but it’s not vibe-coded — it’s a rock solid application that we will support and improve long-term without headaches: https://github.com/dx-tooling/sitebuilder-webapp

One point is now you dont have to pay money to 3rd world countries like mine :(, you can manage with fewer resources inhouse. AI will take care of slop work.

No it isn’t. Writing the code was never the issue with making software, it was designing it.

You can shit out an app with AI, just like you could with Indian workers. But that doesn’t mean it will work properly or that you’ll be able to maintain it.

And most importantly, it only works for code they could steal from GitHub. It has no idea how to replicate sensitive systems which aren’t publically documented, and those are some of the most valuable contracts.

> how they’re potentially losing an $X00,000 account just because the customer can’t use a specific failure reporting workflow in the SaaS. They’re now working with me to build what the customer needs and retain them.

You mean the poor SaaS company actually now has to implement features needed by customers??

Jesus wept.

if you're a software company and all your clients are in tech...you're gonna have a bad time. godspeed.

I disliked how SaaS CEO's were decrying the death of engineers. Their coordinated layoffs over the past years or so was excruciating to watch and experience. Their language was aggressive and inflammatory.

Although the article may also be hyperbolic, I'm not going to comment on reasons why it might be. Instead, I will agree, and think SaaS companies stock performance this year will be proof. Sure, it might not be the collapse that AI doomers are hoping for, but all the FUD they spread over the past few months to years will signal that they're not insulated from it. They made their cake, now they have to eat it too.

been thinking about this too. the middleware layer is getting decimated first

for profit software is pretty gross tho. it can be made indefinitely complex, and people can make and sell tools to patchwork the complexity together, but then u need more tools to patchwork all the tools together ...

and u end up in aggregators aggregated aggregators type situation where optimal solutions never arise because we don't actually cooperate enough to produce them

ai is fitting into the notion that this is all bullshit ... even if not in the correct way

There will be an exiting explosion of internal apps and tools and then it will die down as companies get back to business. All those tools and apps will turn into legacy apps and they will eventually try to migrate data off them into some saas platform because its not core to business.

Saas will have to drop prices to be competitive so fat margins will go away which will probably affect margins for AWS etc.

This immediately lost credibility for me with this quote:

> And vibe coding is fun. Even Bret Taylor, OpenAI’s chair, acknowledges it’s become a legitimate development approach.

Color me shocked! Bret, who directly profits by how his product is perceived, thinks it's legitimate???? /s

The problem is never building, it's maintenance. SaaS isn't going anywhere.

Article is AI slop based on a mostly made up premise.

I'm not one to sell generative AI short at this point, but this seems at odds with the longer-term trend towards more centralized, off-the-shelf solutions, like Shopify, Salesforce, Squarespace, over the "bespoke," in-house alternatives that many companies developed in previous decades. Perhaps AI is making the TCO of "rolling your own" so low that it makes sense to go back to that over SaaS?

goooood.

Honestly, I'm surprised by how people are pushing back against this idea. I feel like vibe coding is just in its earliest moments of actual viability, and my mind is totally blown by it, and it strikes me that it's exactly what I've always wished software could be. Plastic, flexible, personalized, effective, responsive, organic.

As an anecdote, I've been vibe coding an accounting system that perfectly matches with my own expectations of accounting software, i.e., it's intimately connected to CSVs, imports and exports from CSVs, but acts as a kind of enrichment and reporting and file association layer. If there was anything like this, any kind of SaaS that I could have and download as software and run on my own computer offline and be able to inspect and trust and version control so they wouldn't add or remove some kind of feature that I wanted down the line, then I would have gone with that.

But now I have essentially my absolute ideal solution, written with a Python backend and Vue and JavaScript frontend, and it's radically improved my ability to maintain accounting for our business account.

And I think there's something really important to point out here, which is that the feeling of lock-in is very seriously reduced when you are Vibe coding your own software, because if you don't like the way that it works or you realize that there's something missing, you can add it pretty painlessly. Like, that's always been a huge challenge with choosing vendors for a SaaS platform, is you think, oh no, well, what if their conceptual model for what I'm trying to do doesn't quite map onto our own internal systems or understanding of what's being done? Well, when you have your own Vibe-coded SaaS, you can just add that information. So there's something incredibly organic about it. I used to work at a startup in Redmond where we built this large internal system to manage a scientific process with lots of machinery and data, and it was incredibly empowering and actually became one of the core values of the business that was able to be licensed to other businesses in the same industry. And it seems like we're just improving that capacity from here.

Now obviously, if Vibe Coding magically were to go away or became much more expensive, then I'd have this legacy piece of software, which I couldn't improve, and that would be a dead end. But my expectation is that the functionality that we have today will only improve. And in several years, the scope of changes that I'll be able to make, the level of professionalism, modularization, maintainability, code quality, will only improve. And so this has me thinking in general that software is kind of undergoing a step change where we're moving into the so-called age of intent beyond the age of the interface. And that's tremendously exciting to me, and I just couldn't be more stoked about it.

“Software is eating the world” and “AI is eating software”