AI is killing B2B SaaS

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.

3 engineers arrived - fashionably late. We explained them the situation and all we wanted from them was some GCP offering that would cure our woes and one that would cut our bills. The senior consultant - and presumably the only tech guy (rest seemed to be salesy) wasted our time like a used car salesman - he didn't even understand Google's own product portfolio and recommended us to use something like Spanner - which was totally not the solution to the problem, not to mention, expensive.

My boss and I left the meeting pissed off and he told me - "Neya, you probably know more about the product portfolio than these guys. Let's leave". That weekend, I went with my tried and trusted favorite Db - PostgreSQL - CloudSQL with a custom Elixir middleware based an old CMS I wrote a decade ago. After some trial and error, the solution worked flawlessly (and still does till date on auto-pilot). My client still has the lowest cost in the region - 1/3rd the cost of their competitors...7 years later. Back then, there was no vibe-coding, no AI, no auto-completion. Just pure thinking and experimentation.

All this just to say I agree that the new guy sometimes can make the best solutions to a problem and not always screw up. I always listen to new hires these days (now I'm a fractional / CTO) because you never know who could pull off that 1/3rd cost cutting framework move.

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.