Vibe Coder vs. Software Engineer

There are priorities here which are not mutually exclusive. If you are building the next big thing in your garage, polishing it before establishing it's in fact the next big thing is a waste of time. If it really is, early adopters / investors will seize on it like they did on AI. Once that is established, yes there is space for adults in the room to adopt proper procedures for large scale production. I do believe AI can help with establishing the next big thing, and if other's don't, it's a irreconcilable difference of opinion.

It's much, much more nuanced than that.

On one hand, it's very good advice to be clear about PMF. If you have to ask your product doesn't have it. It'll be servers-on-fire obvious when you reach product-market-fit.

On the other hand two things stick out: 1) for every example that proves polishing doesn't matter, there's a successful exception that broke every rule and succeeded anyway. The founder of Figma for example, said he worked on its foundation for something like 4 years before launching. 2) Internet, consumer tech, mobile, sass are all mature markets and the quality bar is very high at this point. It's not obvious that some novel concept will be enough to overcome sheer inertia of status-quo incumbents.

Agreed. I really don’t think this is worth arguing that AI can be a huge help. I was skeptical until April even after hearing many friends tell me how good Opus 4.5 was last year.

Not working on the “next big” thing but I only recently started finding that AI could solve complex problems for me starting around ChatGPT 5.5. Working on a game engine. Some of the quite isolated modules I’ve had it build are not good code by my own standards. The code has way too many indirections to say the least. But they work without bugs and perform well too (i have a very good CPU and memory management harness for my frame loop). My velocity on the project has doubled at least cause now stuff that I wanted to do down the line is already done. I’m definitely a bit careful with setting up isolated guardlines about which files I let a certain feature touch but with models like Fable even found that unnecessary.

Working code that performs exactly how I want on an outer level is valuable. It can be refactored and rearchitected or reimplemented better by just the virtue of having something to compare against and having the edge cases accounted for.

but there is not going to be an inherited and largely non-discardable codebase at every company, right?

and maybe not a team that looks anything like the teams that built and maintain the large codebases that are out there.

the distinction in this article makes all the sense in the world to me, and definitely helps as i try to figure out what term i use to describe my current status as a thing-producer, but part of why i just call myself nothing is it is entirely unclear to me what the new configurations of infra + product vision > actual v0.1.0 launch > new feature development "teamlines" are going to end up looking like.

if i had to guess, one such config might be "the 0.1% of vibe coders who took the HN crickets in response to their projects to figure out how to learn how to do what a product engineering team needs to do end to end to make a self-sustainable product."

(self being that one person, not the product itself)

You're still missing a gap in the middle, where someone knows standards & specifications like "this material in a building this tall will collapse when it gets over 12 stories".