alt Hacker NewsWhat the authors of this kind of doomer-type articles do not realize is that B2B software companies have the data that their customers pay for, and they also have access to the AI tools themselves, meaning they can accelerate in adding new features to their products, making them more competitive.
It's a fallacy to consider the bad performance of software stocks as a definite sign that AI is going to replace them. One needs to factor financials into the equation to explain a downtrend. Take Figma for example, spending 109 mil on AWS bills, cutting through their margins. Investors know that such costs do not simply go down due to the vendor lock-in companies experience when using cloud services.
Claude Code is good, but definitely far away from being able to vibe code Figma.
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> can accelerate in adding new features to their products
If anything AI helps companies escape the "feature wheel" that is used to justify exorbitant costs, while providing debatable (and often even negative) utility to the end user.
Keep in mind, Excel '98 would still probably be overkill for 85% of people's needs in 2025.
What companies thought was adding more utility, was actually just continually stacking costs in front of getting to that core functionality.
AI replaces the core functionality, and the "feature" scheme collapses...
The software industry moat is disappearing. What will happen is 1000 (10,000?) competitors putting price pressure on every saas app.
Software will cease to be a winner take all and be a very long tail distribution!
Claude Code doesn’t need to vibe code Figma. It _is_ Figma.
Take a couple screenshots of your legacy app, write a short paragraph describing it, and the web tool will give you a self-contained HTML file that’s a fully interactive mock-up.
But it’s still a mock-up. So software dev in general will be fine, it will evolve. But unless the AI companies run out of money and it turns out the $20/mo plan actually costs $1000/mo without VC subsidies, Figma is cooked.
I think the corrective to this is that many of these incumbents will fail to re-conceive their product stack from a user-centric perspective, and as a result they will be reduce to just a dumb data layer which is easily swappable.
Sure, they could do that, but the cultural change required is an order of magnitude harder than just sticking an agent on top of their source-of-truth and believing that the problem is solved.
Maybe it works for areas where the application is a relatively self-contained island of productivity. Figma is somewhere that a designer spends a lot of their day, so it's going to be less vulnerable, but most pieces of softare fit into broader workflows. So for Figma the disruptor is less likely to be "AI-powered designer" and more "AI-powered web builder" - e.g. Lovable or even Claude Code itself that just generates great designs.