dharmesh

"Why should companies pay for SaaS (HR/CRM/ERP/etc.) when they could just vibe code them?" I get variations of this question or comment with some regularity (granted, it's sometimes just me talking to myself). Here are some biased (but hopefully, well-considered) thoughts: 1) I am a big proponent and user of vibe coding (what I call "agentic coding"). I do it every day, 7 days a week, including Sundays. It's amazing. 2) My company, HubSpot is a software company. We have hundreds of professional engineers -- just about all of them use AI for product development too. They are brilliant and know how to build production-grade products. 3) Even with this powerful army of talent, the number of internal, core SaaS applications that we have replaced with a vibe-coded variant is exactly ZERO. The number of applications we plan to replace is also exactly ZERO. 4) It's not the absence of talent that keeps us from rolling our own SaaS apps, it's the presence of focus. It would be silly to try and replace our HR, team collaboration, expense tracking and 100+ other SaaS apps we use when we can just buy them. Just doesn't make sense. 5) That's us -- as a software company at some scale. If you're a non-software company it makes even less sense for you. Doesn't matter how good the AI coding tools get. Let's say you *could* vibe code a replacement for that SaaS app you're using, who's going to maintain it? Who's going to keep up with industry trends? What are you going to do when the 20-something genius that vibe coded it over a weekend leaves the company? Who do you call when there's a major bug? 6) If you're a Fortune 500 company at some scale, perhaps you could pull this off for some discrete use cases and the tradeoffs are worth it. You have an IT/Engineering department that is larger than the population of some countries. You can take on the pain in return for the positives. For the millions of others, my advice is: Spend every calorie possible on creating value for your customers.

You likely have people on your team that have been consistently *right* most of the time. They tend to push for a particular decision/path and turn out to be right over the fullness of time. Let's call them "Ingrid The Instinctive" (made up name). A lot of this is often not because Ingrid has better data or more context -- she just has better instincts. Let's call it "decision taste". If you're in a leadership position, here's something to consider: By convention, when faced with an important decision that the team is debating, tip the scale a bit in favor of the Instinctive Ingrids and their decision taste. The burden of proof should not completely rest on them to "prove" their case and convince everyone else beyond all reasonable doubt. Often, these "instinctively right" people are not great at explaining *why* and making a strong case. Sometimes, they don't even *know* in their own heads why they lean a certain way on a certain decision. We should learn to listen to them anyways. We don't always have to go their way -- but we should at least listen more intently. *Especially* if they're particularly passionate about a particular decision/debate. And, if a decision is starting to look like a coin-toss (there are great arguments both for and against each option), you're probably smart to say: "let's just go with Ingrid". Oddly, I didn't learn this lesson just from being a working professional for 30+ years -- I actually learned it from being an indie investor in 150+ startups. One pattern I've seen over the years is that there ARE founders with really good instincts. On average, they just make the right calls. This is easier to tell in a startup, but harder in a larger company. Have you come across these instinctually right people?