Software, legal services and video games stocks have been selling off in recent weeks on fears that new AI features and tools could wipe them out. But how real is that threat? We decided to find out.
CNBC’s Deidre Bosa and I used Anthropic’s AI coding tool “Claude Code” with the goal of creating a replacement for Monday.com, a project management platform with a $5 billion market cap. We didn’t expect to get anywhere — we’re not developers and we don’t have any coding experience. But we have become adept at vibe-coding tools, which are AI tools that can build functioning apps based on commands in plain English from users, including those with limited technical chops.
We started out simple, telling Claude to build a project management dashboard similar to Monday, with features like multiple project boards, assigned team members and a status dropdown. It spit out a working prototype in minutes.
We then asked Claude to research Monday on its own, identify main features and recreate them. It added a number of other features, including a calendar.
The real magic happened when we connected the clone to an email account, essentially spinning up a customized project manager for our personal lives. The AI found Dee’s forgotten calendar invite for a kid’s birthday party (which she definitely didn’t have a gift for yet) and it added reminders to book tickets for an upcoming trip and sign a waiver for another kid’s birthday party.
It took us under an hour, and had we been paying users, it would have cost something like $5 to $15 in compute credits, depending on how much we went back and forth with the AI agent. As more data centers get built out, that cost could start to come down.
So which companies should investors worry about? Silicon Valley insiders we talk to say the most exposed names are the ones that “sit on top of the work” — tools like Atlassian, Adobe, HubSpot, Zendesk, and Smartsheet, that aren’t core to businesses.
They say cybersecurity stocks like CrowdStrike and Palo Alto are harder to disrupt since they have network effects that no one would want to try to replicate and maintain.
Systems of record may be safer, but not immune. Salesforce, for instance, anchors a business with enterprise data, making it harder to clone with a weekend coding project.
With the wholesale sell-off in software this year, that may be a chance for investors to separate between the need-to-haves and nice-to-haves.
