231–240 of 752 posts
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 lik…
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…
what if this time it's senior developers and they actually can slap something together better then the expensive SAAS offerings? what if the expensive SAAS offering is just as vibe coded and poor quality as what a junior offers?
A typical SaaS customer will use many pieces of software (we mostly call them SaaS now) across its various functions: HR, accounting, CRM, etc. Each one of those will have access to the same pool of senior devs and AI tools, but they will pour more resources into each area and theoretically deliver better software.
The bigger issue here is the economics of the C-suite have not changed here. Assume a 100 CPG company uses 10-20 SaaS apps. Salesforce might be $100k/year or whatever. 1Password is $10k. Asana $10k. etc. They add up, but on the other hand it is not productive to task a $150k employee with rebuilding a $10k tool. And even with AI, it would take a lot of effort to make something that will satisfy a team accustomed to any modern SaaS tool like Salesforce or Atlassian. (Engineers will not even move off Github, and it's literally built on free software.)
That's before I get to sensitive areas. Do you want to use a vibe-coded accounting system? Inventory system? Payroll? You can lose money, employees, and customer perception very rapidly due to some bugs. Who wants to be responsible for all their employee passwords are compromised because they wanted to save $800/mo?
Then, the gains from cutting SaaS are capped. You can only cut your SaaS spend to zero. On the other hand, if you have those engineers you can point them at niche problems in your business niche (which you know better than anyone) and create conditions for your business to grow faster. The returns from this are uncapped.
TL;DR; it's generally not a great idea to build in-house unless your requirements are essentially bespoke.
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…
This vibe-coding-will-replace-SaaS insanity is the new crypto-will-replace-fiat-money insanity.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
how dont people understand? if you have a VC funded b2b saas, you need to charge huge margins for the investors to get a return. now, small teams can vibe code a replacement and charge 90% less money. AI is going to kill saas margins. i literally cannot understand why people keep repeating that non tech companies will build their own software, thats not the bear case for saas
Yeah.... The code isn't the hard part. That's not where the value is. This hard part when you're doing in house stuff is getting a good spec, ongoing support, and long term maintenance. I've gone trough development of a module with a stakeholder, got a whole spec, confirmed it, coded it, launched it, and was then told it didn't work at all like what they needed. It was literally what they told me... I've said 'yes we…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
sorry, what do you mean?
1. Enthusiastic employee (vibe-)codes a replacement for a turnkey SaaS product that the company uses. 2. Company uses it, maybe even starts to rely on it for important business operations, and for a time the employee supports that app. 3. Bugs creep in, feature request pile up. 4. Employee either leaves the company or moves on to another project. 5. Pain
Doing this today, in production, with full trust, is clearly not wise, but the writing is clearly on the wall that this is going to be the norm more and more over the coming years. The times they are a-changin.
"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 import…
also, who pays for "a data visualization" SaaS? I guess they mean BI, but for a company of any scale, they aren't paying for a chart, they're paying for a permissions system, query caching, a modeling layer, scheduling, export to excel, etc. Stand alone BI tools are going to struggle, but not because they can easily be vibe coded. It'll be because data platforms have BI built-in. Snowflake is starting down this direc…
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
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It that works, nobody would be using Jira anymore, because people would just use a competitor that's cheaper or vibe code their internal Jira tool. Somehow that has not happened yet in 2026.
This is because what management wants and what builders want are not aligned, not because the quality of JIRA is so amazing that no other alternative could ever be created. JIRA is fine but many people I know that use have some qualms with it because the bloat is pretty crazy.