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Carolina Code Conference
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2026 speaker

Doug Cone

Doug Cone

Inteligence Applied

Intelligence Applied

Greenville, SC

As a kid, my parents limited my computer time (I needed limits!), but I loved writing code so much that I filled many notebooks with handwritten code so I could input it later to see if it worked the way I expected. My first internet coding gig with The Navigators was while I was still in high school.

As a freelancer I found I was building the same solutions over and over again, and started down a path of building my own CMS (as many no doubt have). Along the way I discovered Drupal and WordPress, and I never looked back. After a number of years working freelance, I found that it was tough to focus on the deep type of coding work that I enjoy doing, while needing to constantly sell the next project. From there I’ve lived the agency and startup life, and loved it. Today I’m privileged to work for a company that delivers a leading webops experience for Drupal and WordPress powered websites across some 10B pages a month.

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2026 · lightning

The Moat Was Made of YAML

I run Mattermost instead of Slack. Grafana instead of paid dashboards. Planka instead of Trello. A year ago, that made me the guy who hates money and loves debugging config files. Today, AI agents handle the config files, and I just have better tools that I actually own.

SaaS stocks are down 20% in the first quarter. Seat counts are dropping. The “SaaS is dead” crowd is having a moment. They’re half right. But they’re half wrong in a way that matters.

The real shift isn’t that AI can vibe-code a replacement for your SaaS tools. That just gives you a pile of technical debt with a chatbot on top. The real shift is that solid open source projects already exist for most of what you’re paying subscriptions for, and AI just eliminated the main reason teams didn’t adopt them: the friction. Nobody wanted to spend three days reading docs, matching configs to their infrastructure, debugging install scripts. That grunt work was the entire reason you paid Slack instead of standing up Mattermost. A capable AI agent can now read the docs, match the config to your systems, and get a proven project running in minutes. You’re not vibe-coding something fragile. You’re grabbing real projects with real communities and letting AI handle the grindy parts.

Now, I’m not going to stand up here and pretend this applies to everything. Some bosses still want a throat to choke when things break, and they’re not wrong. Switching costs are organizational trauma, not a technical problem. Your ERP isn’t going anywhere. But your drawer full of $15/seat/month tools that AI can replace with a prompt and an API call? That’s dead. It just doesn’t know it yet.

In this talk, I’ll cover:

Why SaaS is splitting in two: systems of record (your oven) vs. AI wrappers (that avocado slicer you forgot you bought)

The real threat to SaaS isn’t vibe coding, it’s AI-assisted adoption of mature open source

What actually happens when you hand an AI agent the install docs for Mattermost, wger, or Planka (live examples from my own stack)

The friction that’s left, and why it’s organizational, not technical

Every AI tool you use right now costs the company behind it $2-5 for every $1 you pay. That’s a subsidy, not a business model. Subsidies end.

From the talk