Wall Street Apparently Believes the Future Involves Making Your Software Instead of Buying It

If you read between the lines of a recent scramble on Wall Street to sell off certain stocks, you can make out the fuzzy outline of a weird future: one where when you need something in your workflow to change, you’re less likely to buy or license software, and more likely to just vibecode some for yourself—whether you want to or not.

A piece of analysis from Bloomberg lays this out. All at once, a group of software companies compiled by Goldman Sachs lost 6% of their value on Tuesday, and the tech-heavy NASDAQ at one point dipped 2.4%, although it climbed a bit after that.

The reason Bloomberg gave: Anthropic released a plugin for Claude called simply “Legal,†which allows users to “Speed up contract review, NDA triage, and compliance workflows for in-house legal teams.†The plugin adds functionality not to Claude Code, the tool for software engineers (and wannabe software engineers), but to the newer Claude Cowork, the companion to Claude Code for normie knowledge workers.

 

“Anthropic launched new capabilities for its Cowork to the legal space, heightening competition,†Bloomberg quotes Morgan Stanley analysts as having written in a statement. They added “We view this as a sign of intensifying competition, and thus a potential negative.â€

Last month, Google’s release of Project Genie, which lets users submit prompts and receive their own AI-generated game-like experiences, prompted a sell-off as well. The stocks of Nintendo, Take-Two Interactive, the parent company of Rockstar, and Roblox all suffered according to Tom’s Hardware.

Presumably this will keep happening. As more AI extensions materialize that promise dazzling new automation, shareholders will adjust their outlook around the new expectation that rather than buying professionally build solutions to problems—like legal software or game design software—companies will assume that there’s a capacity already contained within AI tools their employees can easily access.

Sure, it doesn’t really follow that legal services software or game design software can really be replaced by these tools, but that doesn’t matter. The more important thing is that investors are starting to think they can, and this belief is now an action—selling—that can target narrower and narrower parts of the working world for potential deletion.

If you’re someone with a job, this is one of the less discussed parts of the drive toward automation: not the part where you lose your job, but the part where your job gets worse because your boss no longer pays for good tools. Your boss pays for a premium membership to Claude Cowork, so stop complaining and vibecode a fix.