In an era of vibe-coding, words still have some meaning. Or at least, they do when they’re harbingers of doom, foretelling a world of mass unemployment and economic ruin. Just over a week ago, a Substack essay by the investment research firm Citrini Research went viral on social media, sparking a market plunge based on its prediction of near-term, AI-spurred financial collapse.
Citrini was far from the only voice prophesying such a pessimistic future. As Allie recently wrote about, public markets have been spooked for weeks by the so-called SaaS-pocalypse, where valuable software companies like Salesforce, Adobe, and Workday see their moats eroded by AI agents. And even beyond the individual companies themselves, there are well-founded concerns that private equity funds have become over-indexed in flimsy software stakes that could trigger a wider collapse.
Other established analysts have pushed back against Citrini’s fear-mongering, which one Fortune editor described as “a highly speculative piece of financial fiction.” That includes Citadel, whose Frank Flight pointed out that demand for software engineers is rising rapidly and that white-collar jobs are unlikely to be replaced by agents anytime soon due to the cost and availability of compute.
