Every week I see another post claiming someone just cloned a successful SaaS in 20 minutes with AI. Why would anyone pay for the original when you can build it yourself over lunch?

I get it. I really do. These tools are genuinely impressive and they're changing how we build software. I use them every single day. But somewhere along the way, the narrative shifted from "AI can help you build faster" to "AI eliminates the need to know what you're doing."

That second part just isn't true.

There are no shortcuts here. You still need to understand the fundamentals of software engineering. You need to understand the tradeoffs behind technology choices. Why would you pick one database over another? When does a monolith make more sense than microservices? What are the security implications of that authentication approach you just generated? These questions don't go away because an AI wrote your boilerplate.

Creating secure, scalable software is an art form. It takes years to develop the intuition for what will break under load, what will become a maintenance nightmare, and what will leave your users vulnerable. AI can generate code but it can't give you that judgment. That only comes from experience, from failure, from learning the fundamentals deeply enough that you know when to break the rules.

I love this quote from Satya Nadella. He said that AI simultaneously "lowers the floor and raises the ceiling" for human capability. I think that captures it perfectly. The floor is lower because getting started is easier than ever. But the ceiling? That's still about you. Your skills, your judgment, your understanding of the problem you're actually solving.

So let's talk about what these clones actually include. You've got some screens that look similar, basic CRUD operations, and maybe authentication. That's it.

What you don't have is years of customer feedback baked into every feature decision. You don't have the edge cases discovered through millions of real transactions. You're missing integrations with dozens of third-party services. There's no support team that knows the product inside out. No documentation, no onboarding flows, no training materials. No compliance certifications, no security audits, no SOC 2 reports. You haven't done the performance optimization required for scale. And you certainly don't have the reputation that makes enterprises comfortable signing contracts.

You didn't clone a $5 million business. You cloned a screenshot.

"If you build it, they will come" makes for a great movie. It makes for a terrible business strategy.

Building the product is often the easy part. Finding people who have the problem you're solving? That's hard. Convincing them your solution is worth trying? Hard. Getting them to pay for it? Hard. Keeping them around long enough to be profitable? Hard. Learning what they actually need versus what you think they need? Really hard.

Vibe coding makes the building part even easier. It does absolutely nothing for everything else.

I've been doing this for over 23 years now. I've seen a lot of tools come and go that promised to make everything easier. And many of them did make certain things easier. But none of them eliminated the need to understand your customers, build relationships, and do the work of creating something people actually want to pay for.

I want to be clear because I don't want this to come across as anti-AI. I'm not. I use these tools constantly and they've changed how I work.

Vibe coding is great for rapid prototyping to validate ideas before you invest serious time. It's fantastic for learning new frameworks or languages through experimentation. It works well for building internal tools where good enough is actually good enough. And it's excellent for getting past the blank page to something you can iterate on.

The problem isn't the tools. It's the idea that tools are all you need.

If you want to build something people will pay for, vibe coding is maybe 5% of the journey. The other 95% is talking to potential customers before you write any code. Understanding their workflows, not just their feature requests. Building relationships and trust over time. Iterating based on real usage, not assumptions. Providing support that makes people feel heard. Marketing consistently, even when it feels like shouting into the void.

None of this is glamorous. None of it makes for viral social media content. All of it is required.

AI tools genuinely do lower the barrier to building software. That's exciting. But a lower barrier to building means the differentiator shifts even more toward everything else. Understanding your customers. Building trust. Providing value beyond the code.

The developers who will thrive aren't the ones who can clone screens the fastest. They're the ones who use these tools to spend less time on implementation and more time on the hard work of building something people actually want.

Vibe code your prototype. Then do the real work.