The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

Isn’t this the point? People use CC for the model, not the harness. So the harness can be slop and it doesn’t matter.

people that 'violate the rules of good code' when vibe-coding are largely people that don't know the rules of good code to begin with.

want code that isn't shit? embrace a coding paradigm and stick to it without flip-flopping and sticking your toe into every pond, use a good vcs, and embrace modularity and decomposability.

the same rules when 'writing real code'.

9/10 times when I see an out-of-control vibe coded project it sorta-kinda started as OOP before sorta-kinda trying to be functional and so on. You can literally see the trends change mid-code. That would produce shit regardless of what mechanism used such methods, human/llm/alien/otherwise.

Honestly, I think it's great that you could get the thing you wanted done.

Consider this, though: Your anecdote has nothing to do with software engineering (or an engineering mindset). No measurements were done, no technical aspects were taken into consideration (you readily admit that you lack the knowledge to do that), you're not expecting to maintain it or seemingly to further develop it much.

The above situation has never actually been hard; the thing you made is trivial to someone who knows the basics of a small set of things. LLMs (not Claude Code) have made this doable for someone who knows none of the things and that's very cool.

But all of this really doesn't mean anything for solutions to more complex problems where more knowledge is required, or solutions that don't even really exist yet, or something that people pay for, or things that are expected to be worked on continuously over time, perhaps by multiple people.

When people decry vibecoding as being moronic, the subtext really is (or should be) that they're not really talking to you; they're talking to people who are delivering things that people are expected to pay for, or rely on as part of their workflow, and people who otherwise act like their output/product is good when it's clearly a mess in terms of UX.

It is hard to find market shares of Viaweb and Yahoo at the time of Viaweb's purchase, the best I've found is that Viaweb was bought for 1/4 of Yahoo's net revenue at the time ($49M price/$203 net revenue in 1998). Viaweb was not profitable at the time of purchase, but it had about four people and quite modest hardware costs.

While there are no companies with $1.5 trillions (4*$380B) of net revenue, the difference is that Anthropic is cash net-negative, has more than 4 people in staff (none of them are hungry artists like PG) and hardware use spendings, I think, are astronomical. They are cash net-negative because of hardware needed to train models.

There should be more than one company able to offer good purchase terms to Anthropic's owners.

I also think that Anthropic, just like OpenAI and most of other LLM companies and companies' departments, ride "test set leakage," hoping general public and investors do not understand. Their models do not generalize well, being unable to generate working code in Haskell [1] at the very least.

[1] https://haskellforall.com/2026/03/a-sufficiently-detailed-sp...

PG's Viaweb had an awful code as a liability. Anthropic's Claude Code has an awful implementation (code) and produces awful code, with more liability than code written by human.

> Most code written by humans is indeed, garbage.

I think that this is the problem, actually.

It's similar to writing. Most people suck at writing so badly that the LLM/AI writing is almost always better when writing is "output".

Code is similar. Most programmers suck at programming so badly that LLM/AI production IS better than 90+% (possibly 99%+). Remember, a huge number of programmers couldn't pass FizzBuzz. So, if you demand "output", Claude is probably better than most of your (especially enterprise) programming team.

The problem is that the Claude usage flood is simply identifying the fact that things that work do so because there is a competent human somewhere in the review pipeline who has been rejecting the vast majority of "output" from your programming team. And he is now overwhelmed.