[mjr00]

> However, niche stuff like vertical-specific CRUD apps that used to be able to charge a heavy SaaS premium simply because they could develop CRUD apps and UI faster than their customers are toast.

You'd be surprised how many industries are just not that tech-savvy. Your average real estate company or accounting firm doesn't have the expertise to build even the simplest apps, and a keen employee vibe coding a CRUD app at a non-tech company is only 20% of the problem. Where are they hosting the CRUD app? How are they getting alerted when the CRUD app goes down, or when it starts spitting 500s? Who's handling database and OS upgrades for the server hosting the web app? These may sound like simple things to you and I, but to a company with zero expertise, the first time their database goes down and they (and ChatGPT) can't figure out why, they get spooked. If these companies wanted to avoid paying SaaS they'd be better off using Excel.

I started my career in consulting and it was filled with cases like this, even pre-AI, where a non-tech company built some kind of internal tool, it got too unwieldy because it was coded like shit by people with minimal development experience, and they ended up outsourcing hosting and maintenance because it was too difficult and they had no interest in building a software department.

[mck-]

One thing to consider is that pre-AI homegrown software is a house of cards, whereas post-AI vice coded software can be better than what most average engineer can craft.

They’re also getting quite good at fixing 500 errors at the speed of a prompt, which is faster than humans

[pbronez]

That’s the big question on my mind. Several years ago we migrated from an in house Ruby on Rails solution to Salesforce. Will vibe coding bring us back to a custom solution? When?