Workday – "No amount of vibe coding is going to produce an HR or ERP system." [pdf] (opens in new tab)

A pretty sensationalist quote to pick out without additional context after reading the statement in full. This is exactly the kind of thing we call the press out for doing.

From the article: "And importantly, our underlying business processes are deterministic by nature. There is a start and end to a business process. Its goal is to deliver consistent, auditable outcomes.

AI, for all of its incredible capabilities, is probabilistic by nature. It reasons, predicts, and recommends based on patterns and likelihoods. Maybe it will eventually become a state machine—a system that follows the same steps and gets the same result, every time—but it is not there today.

You can’t have probabilistic outcomes in running a payroll, it needs to be 100% accurate and completed, 100% of the time."

I agree with all of this. They're not naive as to say that AI will never be capable to build a system like this, they're saying that it's not possible to correctly vibe code an entire system of their size with accuracy today, that seems like a pretty reasonable take me.

They're right that nobody is vibe coding a full ERP system. But that's not really the threat. The threat is vibe coders building the 20% of Workday that 80% of small businesses actually use, and selling it for a fraction of the price. The market for small, focused tools that replace one expensive feature of a bloated enterprise platform is massive and growing fast.

Even vibe coding would have trouble making something as bad as Workday.

i don't know what else they can say about their own business.. but it's clearly cope.

sure, there's a lot of compliance/legal concerns, but AI is probably already better at reading all the relevant information and encoding that into a system than humans.

I don't think a non-technical person is going to one-shot it, but a technical person could today. The biggest issue would be marketing and maintenance (companies aren't going to buy from a single random person who might abandon the project at a moment's notice)