DEV Community: Bartosz Siminski

If Anyone Can Build Software Now, Why Haven’t You Started?

Bartosz Siminski — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 16:10:09 +0000

I asked my developers how much code they write by hand today. These are people who love programming and have devoted years of their lives to mastering it. Their answer surprised me: none. They now use that hard-earned expertise to guide AI, make technical decisions, and judge whether what it builds is good enough.

For founders and developers, the implication is uncomfortable. If software is getting easier for you to build, it is getting easier for your competitors too.

Capital Used to Buy the Ability to Build

For years, a founder needed technical skills or the money to hire a development team. Getting from an idea to a working product could take years.

That gave well-funded startups an advantage. A team in San Francisco could raise millions, hire engineers, and build while someone with the same idea and a smaller budget struggled to get started.

AI is lowering the cost of that first step. A small team can now build and test a prototype quickly. Having a product is no longer convincing evidence that you have a defensible business.

Your Next Competitor Is a CFO

Imagine a finance director who has spent ten years watching her team reconcile invoices, spreadsheets, and data from an aging ERP system.

She knows where month-end closing gets stuck. She knows which exceptions the software misses. She knows other finance directors dealing with the same problem.

Until recently, that knowledge might not have been enough to start a software company. She could not code, and hiring a development team would have required money she did not have.

Now she can use AI tools to build an initial prototype and put it in front of those contacts. If the problem is painful enough, she might even win her first paying customer before looking for outside funding.

She will still need technical expertise to make the product secure and reliable. But she can build an MVP and find out whether anyone wants it first. That changes who gets a chance to become a founder.

The New Founder Bottleneck Isn’t Code

The finance director knows something a team of talented developers may spend months trying to learn: which problem is worth solving, how finance teams actually work, and who makes the decision to buy.

She can call the people who live with that problem. She knows what they cannot afford to get wrong. Their feedback can shape her product from the first version.

That does not guarantee her success. A finance team already has a way to close its books, however frustrating it may be. She still has to persuade them to change their process, trust a new supplier with sensitive data, and pay for the result.

But she can begin with the problem and the customer. Software is no longer the thing she must acquire before she can test either one.

A Product Can Launch in Weeks. A Business Cannot.

ChartMogul analyzed 6,525 software companies and found that only about one in fifty reached $25 million in annual recurring revenue within ten years of starting to monetize. The others did not necessarily fail; many may have built viable businesses at a smaller scale. But launching software and building a company at scale are very different achievements.

AI can help a founder get a first version into customers’ hands sooner. Then the harder work begins: winning the next customer, making the product dependable, and finding a way to sell and support it reliably.

The finance director can show her prototype to a potential customer and learn that it cannot handle a particular type of invoice. She can fix that case and return with a version the customer can actually try. A short conversation has given her a concrete product decision and AI has made it cheaper to act on it.

A founder who builds faster without having those conversations may simply reach the wrong destination sooner.

Who Has an Advantage Now?

San Francisco still offers powerful advantages: investors, experienced founders, talent, and connections that can help a company grow. Money can fund sales, integrations, support, and the engineering needed to serve larger customers.

What it no longer buys so easily is a head start based solely on the ability to build software.

The finance director outside that ecosystem may have a smaller budget. But she knows the problem, knows the buyers, and can now show them a working solution. If she wins their trust and iterates faster than a better-funded competitor, the bigger development team may have arrived at the wrong product first.

The Problem You’ve Stopped Noticing

Paul Graham advised founders to fix things that seem broken, even when the problem does not look big enough to become a company.

The finance director may have spent ten years looking at exactly that kind of problem. She knows who faces it and what the existing tools get wrong. What changed is her ability to test a solution without first raising millions.

If anyone can build software now, why haven’t you started?

Think of one problem you know from the inside. This week, speak privately with five people who face it. If one of them wants a better way, build the smallest version they are willing to try.

Test

Bartosz Siminski — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 11:18:26 +0000

Test

How to use Cursor + MCP to build AI app in 5 minutes on SAP ERP and S/4HANA On-Premise

Bartosz Siminski — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 08:28:44 +0000

The emergence of new AI models and the dynamic changes that are taking place before our eyes in the application development process raise the question of how this new technology can be used to rapidly create products integrated with the SAP platform.

The integration of SAP with AI and development tools such as Cursor offers speed and is becoming a key ingredient for modernizing SAP systems at a moderate cost, on top of which this technology is available today in an On-Premise systems.

In this article, we discuss how to apply the latest AI models like Claude Sonnet 3.7 to create an application connected to SAP using Cursor and the MCP protocol, without the need for a Business Technology Platform or cloud infrastructure.

Shortcut — watch the live demo here: Build an SAP HCM app in 5 minutes

What is Vibe Coding?

Vibe Coding is an approach to software development that uses AI to transform natural language descriptions into fully functional program code. Previously, it was a consultant who collected functional requirements and then worked with developers to create an extension.

Now, instead of writing code by hand, users describe verbally what they need and artificial intelligence generates, tests and refines the code itself.

What is Cursor?

Cursor is a new product, a highly optimized coding assistant designed to create applications together with AI. It allows you to create apps in minutes/hours instead of weeks/months.

Cursor leverages advanced AI models, such as OpenAI GPT-4o, o1, GPT-4-mini, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, or 3.7 Sonnet, and other local LLM models, to speed up coding processes, allowing developers to create applications with AI.

Can Vibe Coding and Cursor be used with SAP?

Vibe Coding, combined with Cursor and MCP (Model Context Protocol), creates a powerful system for SAP development, enabling natural language-driven creation of both ABAP backend elements and modern React frontends, while integrating with SAP On-Premises systems.

Here’s how it works:

Vibe Coding: The developer describes the desired SAP functionality in plain English (e.g., “Create a purchase order approval app with a Fiori-like interface”) to create a functional specification based on business requirements.
Cursor AI: Translates requirements into technical specification using:
Input provided by the user and pre-defined project rules
List of available APIs in SAP (for example, ABAP modules that serve the data),
Utilizing the MCP protocol for custom operations.
MCP Protocol: Acts as middleware between Cursor and SAP systems to access available APIs, list provided services, and deploy configuration to the SAP system.

*Let’s see how it works * we will build an app step by step to visualize the whole process for better understanding.

Let’s Build an app on SAP On-Premise with AI in 5 minutes
We will build a web application for SAP that displays a list of employees in the SAP HCM module via a web browser, all hosted directly in SAP.

Our goal is to build the application in less than 5 minutes to demonstrate the true value that new AI tools bring to the SAP platform.

Our application will consist of two basic components:

An ABAP function module that provides the data for the app,
A React app that utilizes the data from SAP HCM to visualize it

Step 1: Create function module in ABAP
Let’s go to Cursor. We will create an ABAP function module needed to serve the data by simply typing a Vibe Coding prompt for Claude Cursor AI. We will use the AI model called Claude Sonnet 3.5:

Write a function module that returns information about employees

It took AI 10 seconds! to generate operational ABAP code, which we can now save and activate directly on SAP from Cursor. This function module is automatically available to the Cursor API via our SAP add-on, so Cursor can access it and see how it can use it to retrieve the data.

Step 2: Create a React App to Display Employee Data
Let’s create an app that will show us this data. Now, we will ask Claude AI to create the app for us automatically, just by typing:

Create a React application that shows basic information about employees, then publish it on SAP.

It takes Cursor and its AI around 2 minutes to set up everything for us, including:

Creating all the needed project files,
Automatically calling SAP to read the description of the API (from step 1),
Writing all the React code needed for the application to work,
Installing all the necessary dependencies and setting up build scripts
Running it, so we don’t have to do it manually

Step 3: Deploy and Run the App on SAP
The last step is to publish the app on the SAP Application Server. We will again utilize our MCP add-on, which handles all the steps. We simply ask AI to publish it on SAP by typing:

publish an app on SAP

Are you already familiar with our AI Add On for SAP On-Premises? Let AI bring value to your team and organization. Contact us today to implement these AI technologies in your SAP On-Premise system.

Jump to our site to for more: SAP Build Partner
Or if you like to play with AI tech: AI Website Builder

Let's stay in touch! We can help you with:

Integration of AI tools with SAP infrastructure
Custom MCP Add-On development for SAP
Building custom applications hosted on SAP
Building custom AI applications around SAP

DEV Community: Bartosz Siminski

If Anyone Can Build Software Now, Why Haven’t You Started?

Capital Used to Buy the Ability to Build

Your Next Competitor Is a CFO

The New Founder Bottleneck Isn’t Code

A Product Can Launch in Weeks. A Business Cannot.

Who Has an Advantage Now?

The Problem You’ve Stopped Noticing

If anyone can build software now, why haven’t you started?

Test

Test

How to use Cursor + MCP to build AI app in 5 minutes on SAP ERP and S/4HANA On-Premise

What is Vibe Coding?

What is Cursor?

Can Vibe Coding and Cursor be used with SAP?

Would like to connect? Join my LinkedIn. My brands: Instago Inc. (AI Website Builder), Haergi Ltd. (AI on SAP).