SaaS *is* dead. But not because AI "killed" it, because AI killed it

Summary

Agentic Control for Software Engineers Article 1 of 2 Normally, having to explain a joke is a bad sign, but since you couldn’t see my facial expressions while typing this title, I might have to explain what I meant. And why this is hilariously ironic. Thing is, all those Anthropic news reporters (roughly every other person who posted on LinkedIn in ‘25-‘26) claimed “SaaS is dead” so many times, each time with a different “this is the end of the world as we know it” explosive title, where the underlying statement is always the same: vibe coding has made SaaS irrelevant. Yet again. You never need to pay for online services again. Need something? A 10-minute vibe coding session will solve it for you and save you a lot of money. “SaaS is dead”, they confidently declared. 6-18 months into this now. SaaS is dead. Vibe coding did kill it. Not by replacing every online service with a secure, robust, custom solution tailor-made to the specific needs of each person on earth (boy would that be wonderful. Also, boy how naive was I to give them the benefit of the doubt). Vibe coding simply killed it from within. That’s the first irony. Everyone vibe codes, SaaS service are down on a weekly basis. Many people are frustrated. We’ve gotten used to SaaS solutions taking pride in their five-nines stats back in ‘22, being down once a week, at best, in ‘26. What the heck happened? Well, the answer is kind of obvious. But to go a bit deeper beyond the obvious surface, the interesting thing is the radical shift in expectations of markets of the software industry. As time goes by, it’s becoming clearer to us that AGI is not around the corner, that vibe coding is not going to replace software engineers, and that it’s not going to accelerate software development 10x. However, the markets don’t really respond to that part. They’ve already invested in seeing this happen. People have already been laid off, financial forecasting has already been presented to the boards, and now we already have ...