The Vibe Coding discourse has gotten loud. Social media is full of hot takes about AI replacing developers, the death of software engineering, and whether we’re all doomed or destined for greatness. There’s already a lot of truth here, and the explosive growth of Cursor, Windsurf, Loveable, Replit, etc. proves it.
But this noise is obscuring a much simpler reality that every SaaS and B2B founder and engineering leader needs to understand:
A lot of B2B software was never actually hard to build per se. It had been done before. It just was… sloooooow. And AI makes it much, much faster to build.
The Brutal Math of Pre-AI Development
What did B2B software look like before AI coding tools? I.e., just … last year?
You’d spend weeks building features that dozens of other companies had already implemented. A user permission system? Three weeks. An audit log? Another two weeks. Email notifications with templates? A month if you wanted it done right.
Big but routine features – the kind that every B2B product needs – took months to build from scratch. Even with Stack Overflow as your co-pilot, even with the entire internet of documentation at your fingertips, it still took forever.
Why? Because you were essentially doing archaeology every time. Digging through documentation, piecing together patterns, debugging integration quirks, and writing the same boilerplate code that thousands of developers before you had already written.
The hard problems in B2B software were never the routine CRUD operations, user management, or basic integrations. The hard problems were understanding your customers, designing the right workflows, and scaling your architecture. But we spent 80% of our engineering time on the routine stuff.
What AI Coding Tools Actually Change
Here’s what Vibe Coding gets right: AI coding tools can cut implementation time in half or more for routine features. Sometimes much more.
That user permission system that took three weeks? Now it’s three days. The audit log? Half a day. Email notifications? A few hours to get the foundation in place.
Vibe Coding today doesn’t produce an enterprise-grade, secure, durable B2B product with thousands of functioning workflows overnight. Not really. Not yet. Anyone claiming otherwise is selling you something.
But here’s what it absolutely does: We can now build all the routine features in B2B software in far less than half the time.
And here’s the kicker – most of SaaS and B2B is routine. Not all of it. Not some of the real special stuff. But more than 90% of it. And that’s also with Vibe Coding works. It’s just recycling open source (hopefully) code that’s already been pushed into production. To do the same darn thing you’re trying to do.
The Compounding Effect Nobody’s Talking About
This is where the math gets interesting. When you can build routine features 5x faster, you don’t just ship 5x more features. The entire development cycle accelerates because:
Faster iteration leads to better product decisions. You can test three different approaches to a workflow in the time it used to take to build one. You learn faster. You build better products.
Your engineering team stops being a bottleneck. Sales wants a new enterprise feature? Instead of a three-month engineering roadmap discussion, it’s a three-week sprint. Customer success needs a new admin panel? It’s done by Friday.
You can actually compete on innovation instead of implementation speed. While your competitors are still building their user management system, you’re shipping the unique value proposition that actually differentiates your product.
The Teams That Are Already Winning
I’m seeing SaaS companies where engineering teams have embraced AI coding tools shipping features at 3-5x their previous velocity. Not because they’re cutting corners, but because they’re no longer spending weeks reinventing wheels.
These teams are:
- Using AI to generate boilerplate and routine code
- Focusing human creativity on architecture, user experience, and business logic
- Shipping faster, learning faster, and iterating toward product-market fit faster
- Building competitive moats through speed of execution rather than just engineering talent scarcity
The companies not adapting? They’re still having the same roadmap meetings, still estimating routine features in weeks instead of days, still letting implementation speed dictate their product strategy.
The Question Every SaaS Leader Should Ask
Has your team stepped up? If not, why not?
This isn’t about replacing developers or eliminating engineering teams. This is about eliminating the routine busywork that was never the source of competitive advantage anyway.
If your engineering team is still spending weeks building user authentication systems, permission matrices, and basic CRUD interfaces the same way they did in 2020, you’re not just behind on tooling. You’re behind on competitive positioning.
Your competitors who embrace these tools aren’t just shipping faster – they’re learning faster, iterating faster, and getting to product-market fit faster.
The Real Strategic Shift
The strategic question isn’t whether AI will replace software developers. It’s whether your team will use AI to focus on the problems that actually matter:
- Understanding your users deeply enough to build workflows they love
- Designing systems that scale with your business
- Creating experiences that competitors can’t easily replicate
- Building the unique value proposition that drives your pricing power
The routine stuff? Let AI handle the heavy lifting so your humans can focus on the problems that actually require human intelligence, creativity, and business judgment.
Bottom Line
Vibe Coding represents a fundamental shift in how B2B software gets built. Not because AI can suddenly solve hard problems, but because it can finally eliminate the artificial slowness that was never adding value anyway.
The companies that recognize this shift and adapt their development practices accordingly will build better products faster. The companies that don’t will keep having three-month roadmap discussions while their competitors ship.
The choice is yours. But the window for making this choice is narrowing fast.
