Sam Altman called this the fast fashion era of SaaS. He's more right than he intended.

Sam Altman called this the fast fashion era of SaaS. He's more right than he intended.

Good. That will drag software prices down across the board.

But there's a difference between using that leverage and living in it.

When an engineer one-shots 80% of a vendor's product with an LLM, the conclusion everyone jumps to is "we should build this ourselves" instead of "we should pay less for this."

Anyone in an enterprise who has built a tool rather than buying can attest to the fact that the 80% needed for a cool demo is never the expensive part, that's everything that comes after:

The endless corner cases once you move past ideal world demoing.

The integration that breaks when the upstream API changes.

The feature requests from the team that now depends on it.

The security review nobody scoped.

The engineer who built it leaves and nobody wants to own their vibed up stack.

Buy a tool and you're paying for someone else to hold the pager. Build it and you just created a new job for yourself that isn't aligned with your core business.

Agents don't change any of that. Somebody still owns the thing, and vibed software at scale will inevitably collapse under its own weight without active maintenance and curation.

None of this means never build, it means you need to understand how the economics have shifted.

Small glue tools, internal dashboards, single-workflow utilities: building those is more rational than it's ever been.

What shifted is the line, not the answer.

So build when the TCO math actually works, including the self-own costs your engineers will chronically and hopelessly underestimate. When the TCO doesn't work, use that weekend prototype as a lever on your renewal negotiation instead.

The prototype that proves you could build it is worth more as a bargaining chip than as a product.