Software as a service (SaaS) has been the foundation of the technology run since the Great Financial Crash of 2008. VCs funded Silicon valley and everything became an online service. From scheduling people for jobs, to online HR management and onboarding, software handled it all. With AI, suddenly we are seeing a shift away from single vertical companies to a belief that everyone can handle their own software needs.
Where this fails is simply this: Enterprise software has gone through the minutia of what people need and created a best version of how to give it to people.
No doubt today, that AI provides users the ability to craft a workflow in code in no time. Just speak your thoughts and Claude or ChatGPT or Gemini will render it for you. What people miss is the complexities of taking a basic framework or the MVP and scaling it to fit 100s or 1000s of users.
From database integration, and data cleansing, to ensuring compliance, vibe coders need to understand a full system and its requirements in ways that SaaS companies have mastered.
What vibe coding allows is for line employees to present visual capabilities that can impact senior management on what tools to pursue in ways that slide decks were not able to garner attention. Externally, now users can actually show tool vendors desires and workflows in a more hands on manner and expect quicker turn arounds.
Though users can now implement their own tools using AI, as the reality of what it takes to scale from vibe coded prototype to production code at the enterprise level, we will see the SaaS companies continue to refine their workflows and giving users better ways of interaction with deeper levels of customization that has been aided by AI coding.