I considered it a possibility. Now it's set in stone. Instead of fully shutting down in the coming year due to tumbling revenue, leadership decided "What if we use someone else's platform?" It just so happens, the platform they chose is vibe coded.

Like many tech companies during the pandemic, we over-hired and had to contract over and over again. Without the VC-funded war chest that our competitors had, we couldn't compete in marketing and sales. Our brand-awareness shrunk into obscurity.

So, in all fairness, we lost the capitalism game. And, I'm fine with that.

We had a plan to gracefully wind down, unlike Redbox (archived). Once the balance hit a certain threshold, a plan (prepared a year in advance) would have made everyone whole and return the remaining funds to the investors.

Except, the investors changed their mind and would rather take a chance on a future sale than admit defeat.

What's changed their mind?

The technology costs are but a single digit percentage of the monthly spend – the majority is tied to headcount and benefits. When I saw the numbers going towards headcount costs, I fully understood the situation we were in.

The previous reduction truly cut headcount to the bare minimum that can still keep the technology we have operating. Any fewer, and there's a high risk of business interruption within a few months.

At the same time, the current revenue projection calls for the end of the business within a few more months.

We used to have a thousand people. Today, I can count everyone on my hands. A cut beyond this will fundamentally need a different operating model.

Given that our revenue can no longer support the staff needed to run our own technology, how do the finances work on someone else's platform?

Assuming that this Software as a Service (SaaS) can deliver what leadership believes, the napkin math suggests it'll work out.

With this SaaS, they expect...

• No engineering headcount
• No implementation headcount
• No support headcount
• Contracted sales teams to pick up the rest

So if they're going to lay everyone off and migrate to a SaaS, who's going to do the migration?

I'll be on my own for an extra month or two to migrate it all over.

Somehow, I need to keep the tech coasting in its last days while migrating all the data that I can.

I've expected either a winding down or a transition for over a year now. I've come to terms with an ending like this already.

While my peers are bitter about having a closer end date than me, I'm not as emotionally invested into when or how it ends.

What I didn't expect is how a vibe coded app passed as legitimate to the board of directors. We don't even have a contract with this platform yet and people are told they're being laid off.

Legal Concerns

In my two hours of testing and feedback, I found that — without immediate changes to the SaaS — we'd be immediately in violation of the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA), Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), CAN-SPAM Act, Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

How could a platform be that bad? This SaaS has no customers in the United States. Their team is based in another country without similar laws or regulations.

Even so, I'm confident that vibe coded platforms made by people in the United States also unknowingly violate state and federal laws around privacy, communications, and accessibility.

One of our tech acquisitions was through a bankruptcy fire sale after the original company could not make penalty payments for violating the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. These issues cannot be ignored to do business in the United States.

Things don't work

I've used LLM assisted auto complete. I've generated inline functionality. I've generated classes and modules. And I've generated entire web apps. I've seen what GPT, Claude, Z.ai GLM, Grok Code, and Gemeni do across the entire spectrum of software development.

Within a minute, I could tell it was made with Claude or GLM. Every picture zooms in on hover for no reason. There are cards everywhere. Links go to # in the footer. Modals have an closing X button that doesn't work. The search button up top doesn't do anything...

It's like someone took some screenshots of a competitor, asked an LLM agent to create design documents around all of them, and then implement those design documents without any human review.

At the shallowest depth, I can see how a CEO got bamboozled. The happiest path is implemented. The second happiest path is rough. The third happiest path is unhinged.

No hacks. No reading the source code. Just innocent clicking around allowed me to break a critical invariant to running a business: I could place orders without giving my contact details or payment.

Besides displacing jobs, issues like this concern me deeply.

LLM-generated code can enable a business process quicker and cheaper than hiring a full team with benefits. With the experts that still value their craft steering the development, software can be produced just as well as without these tools. Business processes meaningfully affect people's lives, whether staff, customer, vendor, or share-holder.

At its extreme with vibe coding, LLM-generated code will have such poor quality that it is negligent to use LLM-generated code without expert oversight and verification. More lives are going to be affected by negligent software than ever before.

It is so much easier to accept that my life is changing because my employer couldn't stay fit in the economy than to accept it being displaced because of broken software made by a machine. The fiscal performance of my employer in this economy is the root cause, of course. And I accept that. Having to pivot everything to some broken SaaS that breaks the law? That's harder to accept.