Hard to ignore this question; it’s currently moving financial markets. The first comment in this massive 725-comment Hacker News thread makes a compelling case for why the answer is likely no: enterprise SaaS will survive because management simply does not want to be responsible for the vibe-coded alternative.
As a technologist and professor of “buy vs. build” discussions for over a decade, I agree that the death-of-SaaS argument is overblown. At the center of our discussions is the massive gap between building and maintaining, which is underestimated here. And we may not be emphasizing enough this critical aspect: shifting the liability.
AI is now driving down the cost of the initial build, but the build is only a fraction of the value an enterprise solution provides. SaaS also provides reliability (uptime) and the boring essentials (security compliance, data integrity). Enterprise SaaS owns the “system of record,” and migrating that is not just a (vibe-)coding problem.
Even if all of this is resolved, the liability bottleneck is still there; management won’t want to be responsible. Just because you can build it, doesn’t mean you should, and for most enterprises, I can see why they won’t, except for wrappers.