When software becomes cheap to build, a lot of strange second-order effects kick in. It’s not just that products are easier to create; sales, marketing, and every other business function can iterate faster alongside them. That speed erodes moats. As this reality sinks in, I think we’re headed for a brutal shakeout in SaaS.

People still argue that distribution is the real bottleneck now. But when the product itself is trivial to build and change, the old dynamics break down. Historically, sales was hard because you had to design and refine a sales motion around a product that evolved slowly and carried real technical risk. You couldn’t afford to pour resources into distribution before the product stabilized, because getting it wrong was expensive.

That constraint is gone. The assumptions and equations we relied on to understand SaaS no longer apply—and the industry hasn’t fully internalized what that means yet.

I think that we should discern between nonfunctional and functional requirements. Right now, implementation of functional requirements can be done very fast, with the effects that you mention.

But nonfunctional requirements such as reliability, performance and security are still extremely hard to get right, because they not only need code but many correct organizational decisions to be achieved.

As customers connect these nonfunctional requirements with a brand, I don't see how big SaaS players will have a problem.

For new brands, it's as hard as ever to establish trust. Maybe coding is a bit faster due to AI, but I'm not yet convinced that vibe coders are the people on top of which you can build a resilient organization that achieves excellence in nonfunction requirements.

Quality may become the defining factor. Anybody can vibe code software, but only someone who is actually capable of programming themselves and has some understanding of what good UX looks like, how to fix bugs (often subtle and not caught by LLMs), and how to achieve high performance and low resource consumption can build high quality software.

I think developers who have an inclination towards UI/UX and a good grip on the technical side are particularly well positioned right now.

> Historically, sales was hard because you had to design and refine a sales motion around a product

while your statement is true - this is actually a very minor reason why sales is hard.

Only a third of the most is gone - development. Validation and infrastructure/operations are still alive and well, though LLMs make for decent system investigators.

The moat for artists hasn't actually gone down though. Even for those in Patreon with their styles directly trained are raking the same subscribers they have.

No moat? In the software industry?

My decades of experience suggests that the opposite will happen. People will realize that the software industry is 100% moat and 0% castle.

People will build great software that nobody will use while a few companies will continue to dominate with vaporware.