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Comment by laurentiurad | Hacker News Reader

What 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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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.

> 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...

“Overkill for 85% of people” is a vibes statistic, not an argument.

Also you're generalizing some things to the whole sector like every software provider now is useless and the new features they add are not bringing any values. How can you make such generic statements about a sector that is so diverse?

I start to suspect some of you are just private-equity-sponsored accounts trying to push Anthropic propaganda over the Internet.

People in tech are so wildly detached from how everyday people on the ground use computers.

By people in tech you mean the tech bros that do not actually code, just emit opinions on the Internet, right?

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.

so many conditions need to be met to have Figma "cooked". Plus you forgot that the underlying LLMs need to get exponentially better, hard to do that without infinite VC money.

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!

Where are all these 1000 competitors coming from?

You need to have tremendous agency/will to start competing with a public company. Plus, you need to have a lot of distribution channels, competing with sales people that do this for a living since ages, and marketing budgets that are higher than your annual Claude spending.

Regular people do not press 10 clicks daily to track their calories, and you're saying that they will start competing with Salesforce and the like?

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