The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

I wouldnt say that customers are indifferent, but it wouldnt be the first time that investor expectations are prioritized far above customer satisfaction.

I certainly wouldn't call Claude Code "trivial" - it's by far the most sophisticated TUI app I've ever interacted with. I can drag images onto it, it runs multiple sub-agents all updating their status rows at the same time, and even before the source code leaked I knew there was a ton of sophistication in terms of prompting under the hood because I'd intercepted the network traffic to see what it was doing.

If it was a million+ lines of code I'd be a little suspicious, but a few hundred thousand lines feels credible to me.

> Surely you can do better than an LLM when you write code yourself?

It takes me a solid day to write 100 lines of well designed, well tested code - and I'm pretty fast. Working with an LLM (and telling it what I want it to do) I can get that exact same level of quality in more like 30 minutes.

And because it's so much faster, the code I produce is better - because if I spot a small but tedious improvement I apply that improvement. Normally I would weigh that up against my other priorities and often choose not to do it.

So no, I can't do better that an LLM when I'm writing code by hand.

That said: I expect there are all sorts of crufty corners of Claude Code given the rate at which they've been shipping features and the intense competition in their space. I expect they've optimized for speed-of-shipping over quality-of-code, especially given their confidence that they can pay down technical debt fast in the future.

The fact that it works so well (I get occasional glitches but mostly I use it non-stop every day and it all works fine) tells me that the product is good quality, whether or not the lines of code underneath it are pristine.

As a user of terrible products, I only care about code quality in as much as the product is crap (Spotify I'm looking at you), or it takes forever for it to evolve/improve.

Biz people don't care about quality, but they're notoriously short sighted. Whoever nerfed Google's search is angering millions of people as we speak.

But as a great man once said: Later == Never.

I think it's easy to dismiss that group, but the truth is there was a lot of flux in our industry in the last decade before AI, and I would say almost none of it was beneficial in any way whatsoever.

If I had more time I could write an essay arguing that the 2010s in software development was the rise of the complexity for complexity's sake that didn't make solving real world problems any easier and often massively increased the cost of software development, and worse the drudgery, with little actually achieved.

The thought leaders were big companies who faced problems almost no-one else did, but everyone copied them.

Which led to an unpleasant coding environment where you felt like a hamster spinning in a wheel, constantly having to learn the new hotness or you were a dinosaur just to do what you could already do.

Right now I can throw a wireframe at an AI and poof it's done, react, angular, or whatever who-gives-a-flying-sock about the next stupid javascript framework it's there. Have you switched from webpack to vite to bun? Poof, AI couldn't care less, I can use whatever stupid acronym command line tool you've decided is flavour of the month. Need to write some Lovecraftian-inspired yaml document for whatever dumbass deploy hotness is trending this week? AI has done it and I didn't have to spend 3 months trying to debug whatever stupid format some tit at netflix or amazon or google or meta came up with because they literally had nothing better to do with their life and bang my head against the wall when it falls over every 3 weeks but management are insisting the k8s is the only way to deploy things.