Dear WIMM Supporter,
today I look at vibecoding and how this can affect the the SaaS and not only.
Onto the update:
Excerpt from the interview of Ben Thompson with Michael Morton (senior research analyst at MoffettNathanson):
Ben Thompson: Well, brand.com is going to vibe-code their website, don’t you know?
Michael Morton: It’s funny you should say that! I have a tremendous amount of respect for investors in general — it’s hyper-competitive, and everyone at the top of the game lives and breathes their space. This is one unique thing where I tease my friends who are investors, they’re like, “Oh, they’re going to get vibe-coded”, and I’m like, “Guys, let’s all step out from behind the monitors and the Excel sheets and go talk to some merchants”.
I love going to the different industry conferences — they have them all over the country, where you get to talk to operators. Today we actually did a call with a former Shopify employee who managed these large relationships, the infrastructure behind an e-commerce stack is so complicated that, for starters, it’s effectively impossible to recreate the Shopify stack you’re offered for less than you’re paying for it. Even if I had unlimited resources, an army of engineers, and a blank check from Anthropic, my ability to do that at a lower cost is almost impossible, due to the negotiating leverage Shopify brings to the table with all of their partnerships. They have a better fee structure with Stripe than I could ever get, they have CAPI [Conversions API] integration with Meta, because [Shopify CEO] Tobi [Lütke] and [Meta CEO] Mark Zuckerberg are personally acquainted and worked on this deal together, so Shopify merchants get one-click CAPI integration. It’s a long list of reasons why you’re not going to vibe-code your way to a Shopify stack.
Ben Thompson: Even if you actually had the capabilities to vibe-code it and maintain it and all the things that go into that — the unrealistic ideas that go into that — as if a small merchant, or even a large merchant, wants to devote their time and resources to this problem.
Michael Morton: And then when something breaks, things break all the time. If you’re a seller of any size, you’re selling across a variety of channels — TikTok, Etsy, Amazon, Walmart Marketplace — and you’re using a bunch of APIs, and things go wrong, all of a sudden you’re sitting there by yourself, and for the illusion of maybe saving pennies, something breaks, and now your whole livelihood and top line is at risk. Every stock we cover has a bear case, there is no perfect stock, Shopify being vibe-coded is not one that keeps me up at night.
Concluding:
This is why I do not buy the idea that vibe-coding will kill companies like Shopify, SAP, or Salesforce. AI will make it easier to build interfaces, dashboards, and simple tools, but these companies are not just interfaces. They are operating systems for business complexity with integrations, payments, compliance, permissions, reporting, workflows, partner networks, APIs, support, and trust.
A merchant can vibe-code a storefront. A company can vibe-code a dashboard, but it cannot easily recreate Shopify’s payments economics, SAP’s enterprise logic, or Salesforce’s sales infrastructure. AI will destroy weak software and accelerate prototypes. It will not automatically destroy mission-critical platforms with real moats.
Long: SAP, Shopify, Salesforce
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Thanks for your support & have a wonderful day!
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