One kind of company is out in the age of AI, says the CEO of Affirm.
On an episode of the “Sourcery” podcast released on Monday, Max Levchin said that companies without quality software are the most vulnerable to vibe coding disruption.
“It’s long overdue to get rid of bad software,” he said.
Levchin, the PayPal cofounder who now leads the buy-now, pay-later company Affirm, said that companies that make software without any proprietary data or value-add will be replaced.
“The bar for quality of software is going up rapidly,” he said. “It kind of sucks, has a bad interface, but it really serves an important function, and I can’t be bothered to hire engineers or build the same thing myself. Like that excuse is gone.”
Still, it’s not disruption across the board: He said that AI coding tools won’t put companies like DoorDash out of business so easily, calling the idea that DoorDash could be built on OpenClaw the “silliest” thing.
“By way of having a great app, it’s important because it integrates with all your favorite restaurants,” Levchin said.
He added, “So until OpenClaw can also do things like call every restaurant and negotiate with the owner and install the right kind of tablet and software and extract the menus and all the things that DoorDash did, I think DoorDash is actually quite safe in their business.”
Levchin’s comments follow a debate on the future of software after a brutal sell-off of tech stocks, dubbed the “software apocalypse.”
The sell-off started in early February, when already-wary investors panicked about Anthropic’s new AI tool, which can perform a range of clerical tasks for people working in the legal industry.
Shares of firms including Salesforce, Snowflake, and Microsoft are down between 18% to 38% so far this year on concerns that companies can now use AI to build their own tools.
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