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Comment by AbstractH24 | Hacker News Reader

I once built a CRM in Google Sheets fully mirroring the data model of Salesforce. For contact, company, deal, and call tracking for a one sales rep business. (Before XLookup was in Google Sheets)

Did it work? Yes. Was it worth my time to maintain and scale the “platform” with the company rather than outsource all that to a CRM company? Not at all.

Time is finite. Spend your time doing what you do best, pay others to do what they do best.

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Yup, my experience has been that vibe-coding is very time-consuming. It reminds me very much of how LLMs are great at creating mind-blowing images, but you get what you get. Once you decide that you need to modify the image you get, it becomes a time sink. You might be able to change it and get what you need, but there is no guarantee and it's a never ending task.

The same thing happens with code; you may get great results from your prompt, but trying to customize it will drive you nuts and you may never get what you want.

Maintenance is another hurdle. How do you maintain code you might not have the skills to maintain?

Vibe-coding may reduce software creation time, but it's not taking over software engineering. The SaaS business is going nowhere. Most people, by far, will continue to rely on someone else for their software needs. But be very aware that the software business will change. We are seeing that already.

It doesn't make sense for every company to make their own Salesforce clone.

The key is that it makes new companies entering the market to compete with Salesforce immensely easier. More competition will just force lower overall margins in SAAS.

It's not really that hard to make a Salesforce clone now though. Writing the software was never the hard part of building a business.

> Writing the software was never the hard part of building a business.

This is such an important key insight that will take the vibe coding folks another few years to really internalize.

> few years to really internalize.

Given that many engineers have never internalized this, you’re more confident than I am.

It was never the only hard part, but it definitely was a hard part (at least in most cases; obviously there are some monopolies with relatively simple software - mostly where there are network effects like WhatsApp).

But give me the source code for something competitive with Solidworks, Jasper Gold, FL Studio, After Effects, etc. and I'm sure as hell making a business out of it!

Furthermore while good software may not guarantee business success, it is pretty much a requirement. I have seen many projects fail because the software turned out to be the hard part.

I don't know, I mean for most SaaS products this is true. But for something like Salesforce, the feature set is incredibly broad. The coding is not hard, so much as it is just an enormous volume of code.

Yeah, but its still usually cheaper to pay for software than build and support it. I think that will be true for a long time going forward, its just that you can't plan on extracting a ransom for your SAAS.

This is a great way to put it.

We're not going to see the end of software; we're going to see the end of margins.

I don't know for sure, but I suspect that other industries have experienced this. Would love to know which. Photography comes to mind, but I'm sure there are more meaningful examples.

Salesforce literally has its own query optimizer, you are vastly underestimating the complexity of its software.

But a query optimizer only matters once you have an established business with large customers.

You seem to be implying Salesforce’s business is successful because they have their own query optimizer. But the causality is reversed. Salesforce has their own query optimizer because they’ve built a successful business.

My point is that a lot of people think it'd be really easy to build the next Salesforce until they actually try to compete with Salesforce in the market. Like it or not, if you want to build a Salesforce competitor (or try to get your company to build its own) you're going to be compared to actual Salesforce, not the version of Salesforce that existed when the market was new.

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