Something Specific is Happening

It’s been a crazy few weeks in software. Like a lot of you, I read Matt Shumer’s viral essay at the tail end of a two-week stretch where roughly a trillion dollars of software market cap evaporated. His timing was perfect: it read like a demonstration that the world had already changed.

A quick recap for anyone who didn’t read it. Shumer is the CEO of HyperWrite, an AI company. He’s a builder. He lives in the code.

He described a recent Monday morning where he told AI to build an app, walked away for four hours, and came back to a finished product. Tens of thousands of lines of code. The AI opened the app itself, clicked through the buttons, tested the features, iterated until it was satisfied.

He shared a warning that something big was happening with AI that was about to change everything: “I know this is real because it happened to me first,” he writes. “We’re telling you what already occurred in our own jobs, and warning you that you’re next.”

He’s right. Something is happening.

I run a venture fund, which means I’ve spent the last couple years buying software for notes, deal flow, contacts, follow-ups, pipeline reporting, the whole “serious people” stack. One of the biggest pieces was obviously the CRM.

One day, I exported the data to see if I could build my own using Claude Code. I honestly expected to play around with it a little like I did with n8n, discover one neat trick, and then see all the gaps.

But it just worked. So we chose not to renew our relationship with our very expensive CRM provider.

Or, as I’ve been saying: I fired them.

Nothing broke. The only thing that changed is we’re not paying them.

I should say this plainly: I am not an engineer. I run an early-stage VC fund. I’m a former media and industrials investment banker with an undergraduate degree in history. I’ve always been a tinkerer and “how things work” enthusiast, but I never took to coding. To this day, I have to narrate index-match formulas in Excel to make sure I structure them right.

The point: I have the temperament to try something like building my own CRM and some general context about software, but absolutely none of the technical know-how to guarantee that it works.

Turns out, it doesn’t matter.

Tools like Cursor and Claude Code are exceptionally good at building the most familiar shapes of software: a form, a table, a workflow, a dashboard, etc. They’re also very good at explaining how to rig up any other tools like databases you need. Or they can do it themselves via the command line. It makes perfect sense. It’s what they’ve been trained on.

So then I fired Notion. Same motion: export the data, cancel the subscription, rebuild only what I need. I realized I was paying for my own information organized back to me in someone else’s defaults.

Now I build all my own tools. Little single-purpose things. The kind of utilities that used to exist as shareware on Windows XP: narrow, honest, occasionally ugly, weirdly lovable.

Tools that did one job really well. The kind of tools that the economics of software effectively killed.

The Average Software Experience

Building software has always been expensive and complicated in a way that shaped everything downstream.

Not “that seems like a lot” expensive. More like: building an F-35 expensive in 1990, drifting toward building a house expensive in 2020. It required scarce technical knowledge and scarce access to the people with that knowledge. The people who could build were the constraint. The math of products followed the constraint.

You used to buy software and own it: a box, a disc, a perpetual license. Static, but yours. The promise of SaaS was a specific trade: rent your software and in exchange, the software gets better over time. Updates. Features. New functionality. The product evolves with you. That was the promise.

What most people actually got was more buttons, not better buttons. Updates moved the buttons as the platform became bigger, not more specific. The product evolved toward the most scalable average. Tools that solved one problem really well couldn’t continue to do just that thing. They had to do it for a larger and larger group. Every product became a platform whether the customer wanted a platform or not.

That’s how we ended up with the same CRM fields shown to a three-person venture fund and a five-hundred-person sales org. It’s how the general contractor, the psychiatrist, and the ad agency got the same productivity tools. Customization cost engineering time, and engineering time was scarce. Genericity was the only math that worked given the cost of the inputs.

You gave up ownership, and what you got back was a subscription to someone else’s opinion about how you should work. And you couldn’t just pay someone to fix that. The platform was closed. The defaults were the product.

So no tool ever “got it right,” despite being totally auditable and completely deterministic. It just wasn’t built for you. It was built for the most scalable average. That’s why the tool felt broken even when it worked perfectly. It worked perfectly for a user that didn’t exist: the median of everyone who could be profitably served at scale.

That’s why all of us have learned a specific kind of software workflow gymnastics. It usually looks something like this:

Export from one tool. Take the output, reformat it with a VBA macro built by someone who worked there in 2017. Upload it as a CSV into a different SaaS tool.

Wait, there might be an integration! After three calls with customer support, turns out the specific integration you want isn’t on the roadmap right now.

So you build the “integration” yourself: a SaaS-to-SaaS pipeline held together by institutional knowledge and an extraordinarily fragile workbook.

Then you tried Zapier. Needless to say, you’re not wasting another month of everyone’s time on that.

The ultimate API was the human, so you adapted your work to the tool. You crafted processes, deliverables, and salaries around it.

That was the moat. That was “stickiness.”

The View at Sunset

Now drop AI into this system and you get a question that never mattered before: what are we paying for?

For a long time nobody asked because the answer was obvious. The same reason nobody asks why a bridge costs billions. “Claude, build me a cable-stayed bridge” still feels far away. “Claude, build me a better deal tracker” is something you can do before lunch.

To get the answer, imagine leaving. Call it the exit test.

Cancel the contract. Export the data. Rebuild what you miss. What you can take with you is what you owned. What you can’t is what you were renting.

The answers tend to sort into three shapes:

Views. The interface layer: forms, tables, dashboards, workflows—your data arranged into something usable. If you can export your records and recreate the interface cheaply, you weren’t locked in. You were just paying to keep the view alive.

Pipes. The work layer: where money settles, messages deliver, orders process, crews dispatch. In a pipe, the data isn’t “what you clicked.” It’s a ledger of what happened. You can leave with your own records, but you can’t leave with what the system learned from everyone’s traffic, because it keeps learning after you’re gone.

Outcomes. The completion layer: not organizing work, finishing it. A contract produced. A claim processed. A case valued. The pricing tells you what it is—“per thing done,” not “per seat.” Outcomes want to sit on top of pipes, because owning the flow is how you get cheaper, faster, more reliable results.

That’s the distinction: being embedded in a workflow versus being the place reality gets written down. Views see their own exhaust. Pipes write the record.

AI doesn’t delete software. It sunsets the part that was priced like magic: arranging your own information back to you.
What survives are the systems that carry the work and complete it. Most of what we experience as software is the view.

Withdrawal Symptoms

That’s the SaaSpocalypse. Not a crisis for all software. A crisis for the layer most people are directly billed for.

The market isn’t reacting to a specific feature set as much as it is reacting to a realization of who actually holds the power over data.

You export. You cancel. You rebuild the view yourself.

That’s the move I keep making. And every time someone makes it, the second piece, the aggregation, gets thinner. That makes the next subscription harder to justify. Which accelerates the next departure. This is a run dynamic.

The past couple weeks have reflected a pricing-in of companies’ relative vulnerability in the event of a run.

A run on data. Specifically, customer data in the view layer.

The withdrawal is the export. The view is what makes the export useful. AI makes the view cheap to recreate. Now you can take the records and rebuild the interface yourself, cheaply enough that the records still function as a system.

What follows is a wave of withdrawals that used to be too painful, too complex, or resource-intensive to attempt, and can now be executed over a weekend. When a customer leaves, they don’t just stop paying. They stop donating their workflow into someone else’s default UI. The “aggregation” they thought they were renting often turns out to be thin because it was derived from their own usage exhaust, not from durable reality written across many customers.

You can see the defensive posture everywhere, and it’s revealing. Take two companies like Reddit and Salesforce. Both have made their API less accessible.

With Reddit, the thing behind the door isn’t “my data.” It’s a huge pile of which a tiny fraction is my data. The value is in the millions of strangers talking in one place for fifteen years. If I leave Reddit, I don’t “take my Reddit” with me. There’s nothing to withdraw. The people are still there. The threads are still there. The value is the mass.

So when Reddit clamps down on API access, it reads like this: outsiders showing up with industrial pumps, trying to siphon the reservoir. Reddit puts a meter on the pipe. Fine. Annoying perhaps for some, but coherent.

Salesforce is the opposite. The thing behind the door is the stuff I typed in: my contacts, my notes, my deal history, my pipeline stages, my follow-ups. If I leave Salesforce, the point is that I do take it with me. That’s the whole premise of “it’s your CRM.” We were paying Salesforce to organize our data. Key word being our.

Salesforce just made it harder to export your own data: one file at a time, sixty-second waits between downloads, forty-eight hours before the files auto-delete. For a product that promises “it’s your CRM,” that’s a telling change.

And then there are the tools that sold “no locks” as the product. Notion and Airtable didn’t pitch you on being the place you’re stuck. They pitched you on being the place your data can move through. Export buttons in the sales deck. “Build on top.” “Take it with you.” The organization was theirs, but the data was always ours. We just never had a reason to separate the two.

Now customers are doing exactly that.

A Sticky Situation

That move forces a clarification that didn’t matter when software was hard to build: what part of the product is actually defensible?

For the last decade we acted like “software” was one thing. In practice it was two things welded together: a view of your data, and whatever advantage came from being the place where lots of people did similar work. That worked when constructing the view was expensive. Once the view is cheap, the bundle breaks.

Take HubSpot, one of the victims of the SaaSpocalypse selloff. It’s the archetype of “sticky recurring revenue”. It says it sells aggregation. Things like benchmarks, funnel conversion rates, best practices. Some of that’s real. But look closely at the inputs: a lot of it is HubSpot exhaust. Which fields got filled. Which sequences got used. Which buttons got clicked.

The truth is downstream. Email flows through Resend or SendGrid. Traffic flows through the CDN and the ISP. Payments flow through Stripe. Systems of record simply log the transaction. So someone closer to the work always has a cleaner data set than the layer that merely organized it.

HubSpot stock isn’t down ~70% over the last year because I vibe-coded a CRM. It’s down because they have pipe pricing stapled to a view product. Their pricing ladder tells you the real problem: free for two users, then $15/seat, then $100, then $150, plus four-figure onboarding. HubSpot was successful in the early days because they offered 80% of the features for 20% of the price compared to other CRM products. You face the same simple capital allocation problem: build your own or stay on HubSpot.

To stop a run, they will have to flatten tiers, push features down, and subsidize retention. But to become defensible, they have to spend their way into being a pipe: deeper wiring, more reliability, more infrastructure, maybe acquisitions. So they get hit from both sides: cut revenue while increasing cost, exactly when a collapsing stock makes every bridge more expensive.

The potential for a rapid disintermediation between users and their own data exposes the fragility at the core of one of the most reliable business models in generations.

The Single Source of Truth

Companies that function as pipes, although data businesses as well, are insulated from this run dynamic because the data they generate is exhaust from their embedded functionality. When the work flows through the system, the data it generates is not “how someone clicked.” It’s “what actually happened.” Operational data. Transaction data. The boring, valuable kind.

Stripe moves money. Toast processes restaurant orders. Bloomberg didn’t build a terminal because dashboards are cool. It built it because the work flowed through it, and the work created a data set nobody else could replicate. A contractor can leave ServiceTitan with their own records. They can’t take the pricing data from millions of jobs across a market. A restaurant can leave Toast with receipts. They can’t take the aggregate of how demand shifts by neighborhood, hour, weather, and menu design.

That data goes somewhere. In some businesses, it goes back into the product as completed work. Contracts get done. Demand letters get written. Claims get processed. Compliance gets handled. The pricing usually reveals it. When a company charges per resolved conversation, per contract completed, per claim processed, it’s telling you what it is: a unit of work at scale.

The value chain is relatively straightforward: views get atomized, pipes compound, outcomes expand.

The Self-deprecating Bit

None of this has anything to do with vibe-coding. Certainly nothing to do with me making my own CRM.

One side of the discourse says SaaS is dead. The other says calm down, nobody is vibe-coding payroll. Both are right, and both are looking at the wrong thing. Vibe-coding is prank apps and security holes. That’s not where the pressure lands nor is it where the leverage of AI is most exciting.

Cursor and Claude Code don’t replace engineers. They let one engineer do the work of ten. That matters most inside ordinary organizations, at every level of scale. A mid-size company with an IT team and a few data engineers can look at the view layer of their stack and make a rational build-or-buy decision that didn’t exist two years ago.

It also lands at the team level, with capable, curious people. Not “principal engineer” capable. The “I can figure this out over a few weekends” capable person looks at the stack and sees an opportunity to build a solution with the parts that actually carry work and produce outcomes.

We’ve heard this pattern before. A generation of careers were made by being the person who knew what to do with the computer their division just bought. That wasn’t a technical role. It was a translation role: someone who understood the work and could make the machine serve it. The same window is opening now, and it’s wider.

There won’t be a department called “vibe-coding.” There will be people, at every level, who become the ones who make the tools fit reality. They might be engineers. They might not. But they’ll definitely come from the work.

Terms & Conditions

The AI-and-software debate has mostly been an argument among the people most invested in how things currently work. That makes sense. The cost of building software set the terms for decades. This is a tectonic shift and it won’t be painless. But it’s not universal doom either; it’s the uneven leverage of disruption. Once “good enough” software can be produced on demand, the center of gravity shifts from building to deciding: which workflow matters, what truth should be written down, what outcome is worth paying for.

Most of the economy isn’t trying to ship software. It’s trying to run a business. For twenty years the deal was: rent a workflow, live inside someone else’s defaults, and call the gap between the tool and reality “process.” Not because anyone loved it. Because custom was irrational.

Custom is becoming rational. Not everywhere, not for everything, but enough to matter. And nobody in that room is asking whether SaaS survives. They’re asking a much more interesting question: what do I build first?

The physics didn’t change. The bottleneck did.

A new scarcity takes its place: knowing what to build. That knowledge lives with the people doing the work. It always has. They just couldn’t express it as software because the translation cost too much.

I agree with Shumer. Something is happening. But it’s not a broad wave that swallows every job on a screen.

It’s something specific: a transfer of power from the people who could build, to the people who know what’s worth building.