Software Is Becoming Marketing

[delayed]

Having see what terminal vibecoding looks like (to the point where customers say "fix your app" during renewal conversations), I don't think this is likely to happen. There is definitely selection pressure being applied to SaaS companies and I would not expect people not directly responsible (PMs, sales, etc.) to be willing to accept responsibility for technical outcomes; after all they are product, not software experts.

It is possible this leads to a decrease in salary (and positions) but I do not believe the social commentary will pan out in the manner the author proposes. The people who most argue for vibe coding will themselves never accept responsibility for the technical outcomes.

Very, very good essay. I'd like to add one thing to the argument. It used to be the case that your software itself could be a sound moat; that's no longer the case except toward the high end, where vibecoding fails due to complexity. Now, sound moats are e.g. your data, your regulatory advantages, your established customer base, etc., and software is increasingly just a fungible component -- increasingly like, say, accounting: a back-office task to tick off.

While entry barrier might be low, the learning curve become more steep.

E.g. recently I've been porting non-naive app to vibe-code app framework (from engineering managed to product managed).

While I was doing so I had to answer plenty of implication bearing questions but also ask for a very software engineering like pattern. E.g. I had to plan for MIME types unsupported by vendor or use stubbed adapter for the yet unavailable integration connector.

I pulled this straight from my head but boy oh boy I don't wish making this decision without any experience whatsoever.

I'd summarize current situation: building castles on the sand became easier than ever. Good luck with trying to become a tenant there.

This would probably became very true if we would stay with the current prices of 'AI'.

Will we? Open AI is not profitable. Anthropic says that they may have profitable quarter. If they will raise prices will it still be the case? If you can 'vibe code your taxes app' but it will require constant fixes every month and those fixes will cost you 50$ in tokens and it will not be bullet proof, does it makes sense anymore? Maybe just pay 50$ for subscription to similar software? Maybe Chinese companies will keep low prices and it will cost 2$ dollars instead of 50, but that only works if you are doing that to 'vibe code' your scheduling/to do app. If you are any serious company you have regulations and GDPA and ISO and you cannot sent you financial and customer company to Chinese deepseek provider.

And software need constant upkeep. OS update, API changes, libraries get obsolete, build system does not work anymore... etc. This is very apparent for me every time I am doing changes to my Flutter mobile app need an update: I basically need to spin up environment from scratch, then update half of packages, then update all APIs fro those packages because of changes and when I finally do the change, pipeline breaks and I cannot sign the android release. Last time I just gave up on that. Non software people think you can just install Claude and prompt your app. Which is true. But then things break. Data disappear. You do not have backup. Licence changes and you can't use new version of some tool. Binaries got renamed. APIs disappear. Domain is not reachable anymore. And so on and on and on...

Software companies are forced to use 'AI' too so speed of breaking changes will increase and you either have to pickup on those or pay someone to do that for you regardless if this will be 'AI' provider and tokens usage or SaaS.

In 90 there were people in my country selling PC parts on every corner. No there is maybe one or two in entire city and I did not visit none in maybe 10 years. There were a thing because you could just buy parts and build your new system. You still can but now you can just order online.

So sure 'vibe coding' is a thing now but I am not convinced it will be a thing in 10-20 years. Maybe it will be online service that will automatically write an application for you based on specification for few $ but as a user you expecting an outcome and do not want to be bothered by npm and node version necessary for that.