logoalt Hacker News

lowsongtoday at 1:18 AM0 repliesview on HN

I worry people are lacking context about how SaaS products are purchased if they think LLMs and "vibe coding" are going to replace them. It's almost never the feature set. Often it's capex vs opex budgeting (i.e., it's easier to get approval for a monthly cost than a upfront capital cost) but the biggest one is liability.

Companies buy these contracts for support and to have a throat to choke if things go wrong. It doesn't matter how much you pay your AI vendor, if you use their product to "vibe code" a SaaS replacement and it fails in some way and you lose a bunch of money/time/customers/reputation/whatever, then that's on you.

This is as much a political consideration as a financial one. If you're a C-suite and you let your staff make something (LLM generated or not) and it gets compromised then you're the one who signed off on the risky project and it's your ass on the line. If you buy a big established SaaS, do your compliance due-diligence (SOC2, ISO27001, etc.), and they get compromised then you were just following best practice. Coding agents don't change this.

The truth is that the people making the choice about what to buy or build are usually not the people using the end result. If someone down the food chain had to spend a bunch of time with "brittle hacks" to make their workflow work, they're not going to care at all. All they want is the minimum possible to meet whatever the requirement is, that isn't going to come back to bite them later.

SaaS isn't about software, it's about shifting blame.