Wix's CEO says vibe coding hits a hard ceiling when business logic gets complex
Avishai Abrahami ran a controlled test inside his own company and found that even expert developers could not replicate existing Wix vertical logic using an AI-native tool.
Wix CEO Avishai Abrahami has a pointed rebuttal to the idea that vibe coding can replace established software platforms: it cannot, at least not once the underlying business logic gets genuinely complex. As a test, Wix tasked a team of professional developers with rebuilding hairdresser business-management logic inside Base44, the AI-native builder Wix recently acquired. After a week, that team produced only partial results. Wix then escalated, bringing in the developers who originally wrote the relevant Wix logic. Two weeks later, according to Abrahami, they still had not succeeded.
You're not going to vibe for that because the trust is massive. Avishai Abrahami
The hairdresser test is one data point, but Abrahami extends the argument to two larger categories. For consumer platforms like Shopify, he says the network effects and ecosystem depth are simply out of reach for any vibe-coded alternative. For enterprise software like Salesforce, the barrier is different: “You’re not going to vibe for that because the trust is massive.” Data security and institutional trust, he argues, are not engineering problems that AI capability can dissolve.
A related finding concerns AI customer support tooling. Rather than adopting an off-the-shelf solution, Wix ultimately built its own after testing many options and concluding none of them worked for its needs. The through-line across all three cases is the same: the plug-and-play promise of AI tools runs into friction well before it reaches production-grade, domain-specific complexity.