People are lazy. I mean it as a compliment. Laziness is the foundation of the entire economy you and I work in — there’s real research (PNAS, “Buying Time Promotes Happiness”) showing that paying someone else to carry the boring tail of a task makes you measurably better off. Building something is the cheap part. Owning it for ten years is the expensive part. Paying someone to own that tail is smart leadership.

Then AI dropped the price of “build it yourself” through the floor — and broke everyone’s brain about it.

This one’s a field guide for software leaders, told from the buyer’s chair at a defense contractor where my inbox has become a graveyard of founders pitching me a bundle of prompts wrapped around someone else’s model and calling it enterprise SaaS. I’ll walk you through what actually changed (the bar to build dropped; the cost to *own* didn’t), the real difference between “vibe coding” and serious agentic engineering (Karpathy, who coined the first term, has already retired it), and why I will not award a contract to a no-name SaaS with its SOC 2 “in progress” — no matter how good the demo is.

Then the three traps that stack into an outbreak: the quick win that isn’t quick (Gartner forecasts a 2,500% jump in software defects from this style of building), the tool tossed over the wall to an IT team that never agreed to own it, and the big one — AI making everyone feel like a developer, at scale, all at once. (One security scan found 2,000 corporate apps shipped with zero authentication. That’s the horde.)

But I also defend the thing I’m attacking. SaaS is rational. Wrappers can be great. The sin isn’t building one — it’s pretending the thin part is a fortress and aiming it at a buyer who will never open the door.

Know your buyer. Own the tail or don’t pick it up. And finish your SOC 2 before you tell me it’s done.