Why Adobe, Salesforce, and SaaS in general are just beginning their decline

First off, why should you even listen? Two reasons: I'm a SWE with 20+ years of experience that has worked across embedded, mobile, and scaled backend systems including a tenure as Sr Staff at a FAANG adjacent company in SF. Second reason - this is written by hand with no AI assistance. That out of the way... Why are Adobe, Salesforce, and SaaS just beginning their decline? Ill start with a quick story that happened yesterday. I've recently joined a startup and one of my tasks is evaluating AI options for software engineering. We have a fairly complex software engine built by a scientist with rudimentary UX. There is a substantial refactor needed to a set of core classes so we can better obfuscate critical logic. There's a general pattern I established for a single case, but lots of little nuance set AI to work, evaluating solutions. One solution didn't work great - lots of hand holding, wasn't confident in its output, left non-compilable artifacts. Second solution? Flawless. Did an afternoon of work in 20 minutes via three separate prompts. It gave me a true sense of excitement and anxiety. Like, this is insane. A year ago this wouldn't have been remotely possible. Yet here we are, today - and SaaS companies are rapidly dropping in value while many argue they shouldn't be. Software development is becoming more efficient at a rapid rate. Companies are NOT hiring junior engineers any longer. Even Senior positions are becoming a bit harder to come by. Everyone wants Staff+. Because they don't need coders. They need architects. As this progresses, the value of an SaaS is becoming less concentrated in the value of their software. The value in an SaaS is in the increased value and productivity of their users, the intrinsic value of the service. "No shit, Sherlock!" But think of this - are all passenger airliner companies the same? Are all gas turbines the same? They all fly people around, power large facilities. The end capability is the same across all competitors, relatively so, right? Of course not. The quality of engineering and manufacturing makes a HUGE difference in physical goods. Circling back to software, as the software itself becomes easier to produce, the value of that software will decline. Competitors to Adobe are going to proliferate. Salesforce has a larger moat, but it is easy to envision their position eroding due to death by a thousand cuts of small competitors in every corner. Developer productivity tools are absolutely perhaps the most vulnerable to this disruption. As this plays out, a key moat for many software companies - the quality of their platform, built by an army of SWE's making anywhere from $200k to $2m, will no longer be a big part of that equation. If your SaaS isn't providing an amazing service on top of that platform, your days are numbered. Feel free to throw companies like Oracle into this same bucket. This isn't every SaaS. Meta has an incredible network effect to go with best in class software. Uber software bridges directly into services in the physical world. Big data will retain immense value, perhaps growing in value. But the writing is on the wall. In general, the decline of SaaS has just begun, and value is shifting to physical assets, where differentiation in quality can't be automated away.