Nobody's going to vibecode an internal salesforce. On the other hand, the barrier for ex-salesforce engineers to take their knowledge and build a competitor with the 20% of the features that represent 80% of the usage is dramatically lower.

I think the SaaS landscape will look vastly different in five years.

Your engineering focus is exactly the problem! Salesforce as software is a piece of crap, no one is arguing that. But companies continue to buy it because (a) it's familiar to all their sales & marketing people, (b) SFDC is all set up to be able to sell into other large companies (not a trivial task), (c) it already does all the legal, regulatory and compliance stuff, worldwide, which is hugely complex and boring to replicate and needs people on the ground in multiple countries to achieve. Coding is not the problem here.

i don't know about this. the disadvantages to this strategy are non-trivial on both ends of the AI debate.

if the cost of AI doesn't decrease, between skill atrophy and personnel shortages, this will create massive technical liabilities that companies will need to pay incredible amounts (to contractors, or, likely, to SaaS incumbents) to fix.

if the cost of AI does decrease, then every function those companies AI-code themselves is basically horse trading those SaaS companies with big AI.

(open weights models are improving, but most of the SOTA open-source models are from Chinese labs, the huge companies that will make a dent in SaaS revenue are restricted from using them, and the American labs have a profit motive to prevent their open-weight models from reaching parity with their closed-weight models.)

But those already exist! There are a lot of Salesforce competitors that have much better execution. Yet salespeople absolutely demand Salesforce, and unless that changes I can say with absolute certainty no vibe coded clone from ex-Salesforce engineers is going to dent CRM