Vibe Coding Martech - Martech Therapy

The iceberg under the demo

An investor's AI contest landed in my inbox the same week the UK government published an open letter to business leaders about AI cyber threats. Read together, they describe the same reality from opposite ends. And they leave a gap most boards aren't going to notice in time.

Last week two things crossed my ~~desk~~ screen that, on the face of it, had nothing to do with each other.

The first was an email from an investor running an internal AI contest across six of their portfolio companies, one of which I used to work with. The framing was good, and I was happy to see this development. They were asking employees (and somehow former contractors like me) to record a two-minute screen capture of an AI workflow they'd started using. A 15-minute task done faster. A draft response written in half the time. You get the idea.

Comprehension is where the value lives now

Production used to prove competence. AI broke that chain. The same break is happening to martech stacks, and the fix isn’t more tooling.

So, before we sit down and enjoy MartechDay 2026, let's take a moment to reflect on the Hypertail situation as described in the State of Martech 2025, where companies are starting to leverage AI to build production solutions to fill the gap left by off-the-shelf Martech.

"The rise of low-code/no-code platforms over the past 5-10 years has steadily changed that equation, making it easier, faster, and cheaper to build, giving rise to “citizen developers” who could increasingly scratch their own itch by creating lightweight apps and automations." Source: State of Martech 2025 (page 6) by **Chiefmartec.com**

A scale-up

Breaking the Martech Mould

Most Martech platforms solve about 80% of what companies need. The remaining 20% becomes scripts, spreadsheets, and quiet workarounds. AI now makes that gap easier to build. But breaking the Martech mould raises a bigger question: are we building freedom, or just moving responsibility?

Last week I attended a conference with my wife that had absolutely nothing to do with marketing technology.

She is finishing her degree to become a teacher in the fine arts, and her research focuses on a topic that has been quietly worrying educators for years: school dropout rates and the role creativity can play in preventing them.

The numbers in the Netherlands are confronting. Roughly 20% of school-age children are considered neurodiverse in some form. Around 70,000 children are currently not attending school, and another 280,000 are at risk of dropping out.

Not because they lack intelligence

The dirty truth about vibe coding in Martech

After ~1000 hours vibe coding, I’ve learned something surprising. AI makes building software easier. But the moment your tool actually works… the real work begins. Hosting. Security. Monitoring. Maintenance. Are we replacing SaaS, or just redistributing responsibility? Curious how others see this.

Every few weeks, another post appears in my feed declaring that SaaS is finished.

Someone cancelled a subscription, vibe-coded a replacement in an afternoon, and now the economics of software are apparently solved. Why pay €30, €300, or €3,000 a month for a tool when an AI can generate the same thing with a prompt?

The sarcasm around vibe coding does reveal its limitations.

The story has become loud enough that it has started leaking into financial markets. Investors are suddenly trying to understand what AI-assisted software creation might do to companies like HubSpot, Adobe, and Salesforce. If every

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