You can build the correct product. The bigger issue is convincing people to take a chance on some unknown vendor. Besides no company or any size wants to or should depend on a lot of unsupported vibe coded internal slop. It’s no different than the old VB apps or Access apps
Anyone who thinks Salesforce is easy to replace hasn’t been part of large sales and consulting organizations - or hasn’t been close to sales side. Heck, even AWS’s internal consulting department depends on Salesforce.
Ok, anyone can build it - let’s say I believed that.
Now try to displace Salesforce, Slack, ServiceNow, Workday, etc.
No corporate buyer is going to take a chance on your homegrown vibe coded replacement that they saw on HN where the author didn’t even seem to know the importance of having SSO support.
Besides “no one ever got fired for buying IBM”. Why would I take the reputational risk of not just buying from the well known company who is already at the right square of “Gartner’s magic quadrant”?
Writing software has never been the challenge. If anyone can write software, Microsoft can just throw a few engineers at it and bundle it in thier corporate seat licensing
Funny enough, I lived through all of those eras starting with assembly in 1986 in sixth grade),
1996 - C and Fortran on DEC VAX and Stratus VOS mainframes
2001 - C/C++ on PCs and mainframes and starting to work on VB
2006 - JavaScript/C#/some Perl
2011 - C# on Windows ruggedized devices
2016 - .NET Core
2021 - Working as an L5 at AWS (ProServe)
2026 - staff consultant at a 3rd party consulting company. Every single project I’ve done has had Bedrock (AWS service that host most of the popular models) and I constantly have three terminal sessions open - one to run code, one running Codex and the other running Claude.
1. No, implementing well defined requirements were not commoditized a decade ago. You still have to come up with the design and proper (efficient,correct,...) solution that respects the requirements. it was and still is the skill set of a L4/L5 SWE.
2. If you think LLMs cannot help with navigating ambiguity and requirements, you are wrong. it might not be able to 100% crack it (due to not having all the necessary context), but still help a lot.
You realize you are arguing my point? We are in complete agreement about #1.
As far as #2, I came into a large project at my new at the time company last year one week before having to fly out to a customer site. I threw everything I could find about the project into NotebookLM and started asking it questions like I would ask the customer. Tools like Gong are pretty good to at summarizing calls. I agree with you on #2.
I am at a point now where I am the first technical person after sales closes a deal and I lead (larger) projects and do smaller projects myself. But I realize remotely, my coworkers from Latin America are just as good as I am now and cheaper.
I’m working on moving to a sales role when I see the time coming. It’s high touch and the last thing that can’t be taken over.
I would never have trusted any L4 or L5 SWE I met at AWS anywhere near one of my customers (ProServe). But they also wouldn’t let me put code into a repo that ran an AWS service. Fair is fair
If I remember correctly, the leveling guidelines were (oversimplifying).
An L4 should be able to handle a well defined story
An L5 should be able to handle a well defined Epic where the what is known bit not how
An L6 should be able to lead a more ambiguous longer term project made of multiple Epics.
I was saying it was not commoditized a decade ago, but i feel it's getting commoditized *now*. So you seem to be basically saying SWE is over and it's time to move on to something that is primarily based on human-human interaction?
Yes it has to be. LLMs are getting to the point they can do everything else. What they can’t do, cheaper non US labor can.
For context, the software developer market in the US is very bimodal, most developers are on the enterprise dev side (including most startups like YC companies). I’m referring to this side - not FAANG and equivalent
By commoditization back then, I knew there was nothing I could do on that side of the market that would let me make more than around $150K-$165K. My plan then was to get on the other side of the market in 2020 after my youngest graduated and out of enterprise dev.
“Commodization” now means too many people chasing too few job. In 2016, I could throw my resume up in the air and get three or four random enterprise dev job offers within less than a month - now not so much.
I discovered AWS belatedly later that year and my thesis was changed to I want to do #1 that you said above - customer focused, using AWS as a tool, and bringing a developer mindset to cloud implementations.
It just magically happened in June 2020 that both felt into my lap - cloud consulting full time opportunity at BigTech (no longer there thankfully).
Well an LLM only helps you code, coding is not a competitive skill in 2026. If your “work” can be commoditized by a next word predictor, it was going to be commoditized by someone willing to work for less than you make anyway
How is doing either going to keep you competitive in the market when everyone is coding faster than you using modern tools?
That stance honestly sound like me not using a compiler and doing everything in assembly like I did 40 years ago in my bedroom in 6th grade on my Apple //e.
I might be an old guy at 51. But I’m not that old guy. I’m the old guy who didn’t have to worry about “ageism” in 2020 when I got my first (and hopefully last ) job at BigTech in 2020, another after looking for two weeks in 2023 (with 3 offers) and another in 2024 when looking just by responding to an internal recruiter - I’m a staff cloud consultant (full time) specializing in app dev.
Not claiming I’m special. But I like to eat, stay clothes and stay housed. I do what it takes
Are they coding faster? The METR 2025 study shows LLM users feel faster but are actually slower. If LLMs make programmers more productive, then awesome LLM–written software is available everywhere for a low price — so where is it?
Why would any company past the savings on to you? Besides “no one ever got fired for buying IBM”. No company is going to replace SalesForce with a vibe coded alternative they find out about on “Ask HN”. Coding has never been the issue with having a successful project. Look at all of the companies who were crushed by BigTech just throwing a few developers at the same problem and having a good enough alternative.
I hate to tell you this - but you are completely wrong and you need to learn how to use modern tools to do your job.
Source: Professional software developer (or adjacent) for 30 years and I’ve worked in cloud architecture for 8 years working with both cloud architecture and software developer - at a startup, then working at AWS directly and now a staff consultant at a third party firm.
I don’t “vibe code”. I keep my hands on the wheel and treat AI as a junior developer.
I know AWS (and before that on prem architecture). For infrastructure as code, I j know CloudFormation and have use it for 8 years.
I had a project that wanted to use the CDK. I gave ChatGPT the contract with the requirements, the transcript of my customer call where I went over the design proposal and the well labeled architecture diagram I did.
I told ChatGPT (didn’t use Codex) I needed Terraform for the architecture. I asked it for suggestions. I filled in a few blanks and just started copying and pasting the files to my IDE (yeah I know there is a better way. I am getting to that)
Here is where the little vibe coding comes in. Another guy wrote the web front end for the client. I don’t do web programming. I needed to remove the customer specific requirements so yeah, I just told Claude Code what I needed to do and it did it. I threw it on our internal GitHub account in case I needed it later as a generic reusable solution.
Ends up I could use it for my next project - but they wanted CloudFormation. I have certain patterns, helper scripts, shell scripts I use when doing CloudFormation deployments that I developed (and put through the open source process) at AWS.
I created a folder with both my Terraform based project and my CFT reference project and used Claude Code to convert one piece at the time.
On the software development side, on that same project, I designed the backend API how I wanted it to be exposed and the architecture. I’m not ashamed to admit I didn’t write a single line of code and it was all AI generated.
I did the customer facing work, the design, the architecture, delivery, etc. I stand by the architecture.
Anything I know the best practices on how to architect. I don’t do “agentic coding”. I treat AI as a junior developer I have to tell everything and check the work at every phase.
I work in cloud consulting specializing in app dev. I know AWS well (trust me on this). I don’t know Terraform or the CDK. I use CloudFormation. I was very comfortable not knowing either on projects because I knew I could troubleshoot issues and be prescriptive and detailed.
I wouldn’t try to be an “Azure Architect” and not know the first thing about Azure and depend on AI.
You realize that you just answered your own question? It’s bad enough when a manager also tries to be a developer working in a production system (instead of doing research, POCs, enablement type work if they really want to code), the last thing I want is some vibe coded slop from my manager.
But yes as a staff cloud architect who specializes in app dev, I very much treat AI as a junior developer who “learns” by my telling it to summarize discussions/preferences in markdown in the repo.
I do a phase approach when I use AI just like when I don’t where I test a little at the time. It gets too difficult to manage and explain otherwise.
Anyone who thinks Salesforce is easy to replace hasn’t been part of large sales and consulting organizations - or hasn’t been close to sales side. Heck, even AWS’s internal consulting department depends on Salesforce.
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