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Key takeaways:
- Anyone can vibe code a clone. That doesn’t mean it’s worth anything. Real software value lives in proprietary data, architecture, security, and user habits.
- If consultants can rebuild your interface in days, it was never really a moat: specialist software, complex requirements, and domain IP remain firmly in human territory.
- Developers aren’t becoming less important – they’re shifting from building features to building confidence.
Ask a modern AI-coding tool to build a Slackalike, or a rough facsimile of a project management dashboard, and it can often produce you something plausible within hours: channels, boards, logins, status buttons, and a version of a product people already pay for.
It’s not just hobbyists and tinkerers doing it, either. Bain & Company is reportedly using AI tools to recreate rough versions of software products during acquisition work, including one example reported by the Financial Times where a private equity bidder reportedly walked away after seeing what could be rebuilt.
It begs the question, if a handful of consultants can vibe code your product in a few days, what happens to the future of devs?
The answer is not quite that software developers are suddenly meaningless. It is that some things software companies have historically described as moats were probably never moats at all.
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Clone wars
“While they do have genuine uses, I feel that the use of AI-generated product clones in due diligence is somewhat of a gimmick,” says Carl Austin, managing director at Slalom.
A clone can show that the visible interface of a product is not especially hard to reproduce, but clones can quickly break. Real diligence in software engineering is as much about architecture, scalability, maintainability, security, compliance, and the capability of the team behind the product, says Austin.
The clone test is more useful as a commercial exercise than a technical one. For Bain, vibe coding a copy of an app helps it explore how much of a potential acquisition target is just the feature set their app offers. If the secret sauce can be rebuilt quickly, the valuation of that firm may not be totally valid.
Beyond that, Austin argues that the hardest parts to replicate are usually not the code itself, but “proprietary data, algorithms, stickiness of the existing userbase, community, or complex non-functional requirements”.
That is why a Slackalike isn’t Slack. It may look like a workplace chat app, but it doesn’t have the integrations, search history, compliance controls, enterprise administration, developer ecosystem, customer habits, or organizational dependency out of the box.
Danger: untested code
Software developers’ jobs therefore change to being less about the production of basic features and interfaces, and more about the holistic elements that make certain apps and products successful.
Making that case to customers will become even more important because they can so easily spin up something that looks polished, but isn’t.
More like this
“Systems most at risk are commodity business management systems,” reckons Jaco Vermeulen, CTO at BML Global, but that specialist software for specific industries or use cases will still be firmly in the realm of human-generated code. “This is IP,” he says, more than anything else.
Still, the real danger is that AI-generated software can look more finished than it is. A recent arXiv preprint looking at vibe-coded systems found that, in one benchmark of 200 real-world software engineering tasks, 61% of solutions from SWE-Agent using Claude 4 Sonnet were functionally correct, but only 10.5% were secure.
While that may be a useful way for software engineers to make the case for their continued employment, Bain’s experiments do show that the sector still has to do more to show why it’s worthwhile.
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Ori Bendet, VP of product management at Checkmarx, argues Bain has shown that “building is no longer a moat.” Software engineers now have to show would-be customers why they’re worth their while – which is where “the security posture, the supply chain integrity, or the compliance rigor that actually makes a software business defensible” comes in, Bendet says.
That changes what software engineers are. In Bendet’s view, “developers aren’t becoming less important; they’re shifting from building features to building confidence.”
