Software company shares have plunged recently, drawing attention to a narrative that AI will threaten software companies’ position, but counterarguments are also growing.

Finbarr Taylor (핀바 테일러), a former CEO and CTO of Shogun, has also used social media platform X (Twitter) to stress that AI-driven “end of software” claims are an excessive leap.

He said the logic driving the stock slump is simple. AI coding tools such as Claude Code make software development too easy, pushing the value of existing software companies toward zero. If you can build something that looks like Salesforce over a weekend, then Salesforce is dead, the argument goes.

A post by Matt Schumer titled "Something Big Is Happening" has drawn more than 5 million views. It argued AI is changing everything. But there is a logical leap between the claim that AI is transformative and the conclusion that investors should "sell all software."

He said, "The market heard ‘AI changes everything’ and concluded ‘software is worthless.’ The core of Schumer’s piece is that people need to use AI tools seriously. The tools they should use are SaaS products with paid subscriptions."

You can build something that looks like Reddit over a weekend, but making 100 million people use it daily and building a moderator ecosystem, community culture, API integrations and advertiser relationships is a different order of problem from building it, he argued.

He said, "Salesforce is not a CRM interface. It is 10 years of accumulated customer data, thousands of AppExchange integrations, an ecosystem that has built careers on the platform, and trust earned from Fortune 500 companies. The vibe-coding logic confuses how software looks with how it functions inside organisations."

He added, "The moats held by listed SaaS companies are clear. They are network effects, high switching costs, data moats, brand trust and regulatory infrastructure. The more companies use Slack, the more valuable Slack becomes. Replacing an ERP system brings company-wide disruption. Unique data accumulated over years cannot be replicated. A CISO chooses CrowdStrike, not a site registered an hour ago. Compliance such as SOC 2 and HIPAA cannot be imitated by a weekend project."

He continued, "AI is a symmetric weapon. If a competitor can copy your features over a weekend, you can copy theirs too. Incumbents are actually advantaged because they have a user base, distribution, data and brand. The barrier to having a good idea has not fallen at all. Slack did not beat email because coding was easy. It won by reimagining how teams communicate. Figma did not beat Adobe by writing code quickly. It won by rethinking collaboration," he said.