The software sector's worst nightmare just got real. CNBC reporters with zero coding experience used Anthropic's Claude Code to build a functioning Monday.com replacement in under an hour for less than $15. The experiment provides the first empirical evidence behind the fears driving a 30% selloff across enterprise SaaS stocks, as investors scramble to separate which software companies face existential AI threats versus temporary disruption.
The AI disruption everyone's been warning about just moved from theory to reality. Two CNBC reporters with no coding background sat down with Anthropic's Claude Code and emerged an hour later with a functioning replacement for Monday.com, the $5 billion project management platform that's become a staple for teams worldwide.
The experiment wasn't planned as a takedown. CNBC's Deidre Bosa and reporter Jasmine Wu simply wanted to test whether the existential dread gripping software stocks had any basis in reality. "We didn't expect to get anywhere," Wu wrote in the published experiment. What they found should terrify every SaaS executive watching their stock price crater.
They started simple, instructing Claude to build a project management dashboard with multiple boards, team assignments and status dropdowns. The AI agent spit out a working prototype in minutes. Then they got ambitious, asking Claude to research Monday.com independently, identify its core features and recreate them. The AI complied, adding calendars and additional functionality without human intervention.
But the real moment came when they connected their clone to an email account. The AI transformed into a personalized project manager, surfacing a forgotten birthday party invitation, flagging unsigned waivers and adding travel booking reminders. It cost somewhere between $5 and $15 in compute credits, depending on iteration cycles. As hyperscalers build out more data centers, that cost trajectory points in only one direction.
