The value in enterprise SaaS offerings isn't just the application functionality but the IaaS substrate underneath. The vendor handles server operations, storage, scalability, backups, security, compliance, etc. It might be easier for companies to vibe code their own custom applications now but LLMs don't help nearly as much with keeping those applications running. Most companies are terrible at technical operations. I predict we'll see a new wave of IaaS startups that sell to those enterprise vibe coders and undercut the legacy SaaS vendors.

The right move is this, turned to 11.

Velocity or one-shot capability isn't the move. It's making stuff that used to be traumatic just...normal now.

Google fucking vibe-coded their x86 -> ARM ISA changeover. It never would have been done without agents. Not like "google did it X% faster." Google would have let that sit forever because the labor economics of the problem were backwards.

That doesn't MATTER anymore. If you have some scratch, some halfway decent engineers, and a clear idea, you can build stuff that was just infeasible or impossible. all it takes is time and care.

Some people have figured this out and are moving now.

Sensible people would do that (asking for just the features they need), but look at us, are we sensible?

Most of us* are working for places whose analytics software transitively asks the user for permission to be tracked by more "trusted" partners than the number of people in a typical high school, which transitively includes more bytes of code than the total size of DOOM including assets, with a performance hit so bad that it would be an improvement for everyone if the visitor remote desktop-ed into a VM running Win95 on the server.

And people were complaining about how wasteful software was when Win95 was new.

* Possibly an exaggeration, I don't know what business software is like; but websites and, in my experience at least, mobile apps do this.

So maybe the saas will pivot to just sell some barebone agents that include their real IP? The rest (UI, dashboards and connectivity) will be tailored made by LLMs

I highly doubt that, and its in OPs article.

First, a vendor will have the best context on the inner workings and best practices of extending the current state of their software. The pressure on vendors to make this accessible and digestable to agents/ LLMs will increase, though.

Secondly, if you have coded with LLM assistance (not vibe coding), you will have experienced the limited ability of one shot stochastic approaches to build out well architected solutions that go beyond immediate functionality encapsulated in a prompt.

Thirdly, as the article mentions, opportunity cost will never make this a favorable term - unless the SaaS vendor was extorting prices before. The direct cost of mental overhead and time of an internal team member to hand-hold an agent/ write specs/ debug/ firefight some LLM assisted/ vibe coded solution will not outweigh the upside potential of expanding your core business unless you're a stagnant enterprise product on life support.