A few weeks ago I asked the question: if you are a SaaS, what's your moat? What keeps someone from cloning you over a weekend?
I've been sitting with that question ever since. I think I have an answer.
Regulations.
If you are building a dice roller for online D&D players, you have no moat. Someone will clone it before your coffee gets cold. But the moment you collect and store any personally identifiable information, everything changes. Because if you collect it, you own it. You are responsible for it. Every byte of it. Forever.
Got European users? Does their data have to stay in Europe? Got sensitive health information? Does it need to be encrypted at rest? Got payment data? You just inherited a compliance framework that takes teams of lawyers and engineers to get right.
Vibe coders are not going to know these rules exist. And the ones who do are not going to want to deal with them.
Here is the part that keeps me up at night. When a vibe coder builds something that violates the rules — cleartext passwords, unencrypted PII, data stored in the wrong country — they will eventually be held accountable. But that accountability comes after. After the breach. After the leak. After the damage.
The people whose data was exposed do not get a do-over.
Responsibility is not just your moat. It is your promise to the people who trusted you with their information. Vibe coders can copy your features. They cannot copy that.
Originally posted on LinkedIn: "Your Moat Is Responsibility"