2026 has been a watershed year in software engineering. The debate over whether AI would ever replace human developers is over: New, improved – often self-improved – AI tools are landing with startling regularity, and the results speak for themselves.
Agentic coding assistants can now execute complex tasks autonomously, write production-ready code, and iterate on feedback with minimal human intervention.
The jury is still out on ownership, responsibility and liability but at Vaadin, we’re not taking sides in that conversation. We’re embracing AI and helping our users make the most of it.
For our customers building new mission critical applications in Java, we offer a well understood, opinionated and secure coding framework with built-in guardrails that improve readability and maintenance. After 25 years of constant improvement, few would dispute that the “opinions” behind Vaadim’s frameworks are worth following.
For a customer looking to modernize a legacy application, we offer products that wrap around these desktop applications and instantly migrate them to the browser. Our framework can then be used to selectively modernize the “wrapped” application” which continues to run uninterrupted during the migration process.
In both cases, our opinionated, secure framework significantly reduces token usage, reducing overall cost.
Our customers think of us as a technical arm they can depend on as they build or modernize mission-critical apps in Java. They lean on us to remain current with technology -- safe, supported and extremely productive. Now that things are moving at the speed of AI, we’re reinforcing the “safe and supported” aspect, providing guardrails from the get-go as well as compliance, and up to 15 years of support.
More than 100 of our customers engaged with us in a conversation about AI late last year, and of course we came away with opinions that were all over the map. Some organizations had outright AI bans. But others said things like this:
“I’ve been using Vaadin for a long time, and have always been 10 times more productive with it. Now, thanks to Vaadin *and* AI, I’m 100 times more productive.”
It isn’t only about speed. Customers also want to establish a safe, secure architecture that will help their code match up with what came before, and what will come after, so that things don’t spill over and get out of hand.
They want everything to be AI-enabled, which for us means setting up tools and frameworks that can be used by agents as well as humans.
Modernization of legacy software is big business, fueled recently by the entrance of giants like Anthropic and Google into the market. We’ve been in this space for 25 years now, and fully acknowledge that AI software development tools have indeed changed the game. But the engineers that use our products know that as leaders in the Java world, our tools and advice are relevant and cost-effective.
A company considering modernizing a critical legacy app by sticking the whole thing into Claude Code is likely to suffer “token sticker shock.” This will become more of a problem as the big LLM players IPO and come under pressure to narrow their losses.
Using AI along with Vaadin’s tools provides flexibility and assurance that the guardrails you need are in place from the start.
Individual developers stick with Vaadin because they care about productivity, components, and the ability to build a web application in Java without assembling a separate frontend stack. These will always be essential parts of Vaadin.
The people who manage large organizations appreciate those things, but they have another layer of responsibility that is a key to credibility. We are reaching out to these decision-makers.
The new Vaadin Enterprise Edition goes well beyond the standard assurances, addressing every procurement, compliance, and long-term maintenance question at a company-wide level.
When Vaadin becomes part of an organization’s critical infrastructure, Enterprise Edition provides the auditability, compatibility, and lifecycle support required for peace of mind.