> The author himself never experienced the things he's writing about
not all of those things, but a good part, he did. He was extremely broke at several points in his adult life, and served in prison, and was almost executed, so he's seen quite a few lows he's writing about.
by "maintainability" and "rarely remembered by the engineer" i'm assuming the bigger concern (beyond commenting and sane code) is once everyone starts producing tons of code without looking - and reading(reviewing) code is, to me at least, much harder than writing - then all of this goes unchecked:
* subtle footguns
* hallucinations
* things that were poorly or incompletely expressed in the prompt and ended up implemented incorrectly
* poor performance or security bugs
other things (probably correctable by fine-tuning the prompt and the context):
* lots of redundancy
* comments that are insulting to the intelligence (e.g., "here we instantiate a class")
* ...
not to mention reduced human understanding of the system and where it might break or how this implementation is likely to behave. All of this will come back to bite during maintenance.
> the company re-cap'd employees at a more realistic valuation a couple years back. So looks like all employees benefited here which is a major win. Respect to the founders for looking out!
i get what you are saying, but i don't think it's fair to call it bike shedding, getting the keys right is also important, one can easily screw up that part too
> they were offering Java tools free to schools for teaching and research
This is also underrated considering there once was an era when you had to pay a lot of money to use a compiler (or almost any software, really) and had to pay a lot of money to access documentation (!) oh what a crazy world it was.
What's impressive is that somebody, somewhere keeps collecting a nice stash of Eastern Baltic cod otoliths in hopes that somebody else would come along and invent a new way to use them.
same here, i dread CSS because it has to look good visually, not regress, work on a ton of devices and is very time-consuming to get right. But every time i tried Cursor with different models it produces CSS code that is just really bad. And the CSS hacks it knows somehow just don't add up to a good solution. Maybe it'll catch up, but so far the result has been worse than mine, so - still coding manually.
Yes, that's a good point. However, how much of this finer-grain lending flexibility translates into more favorable underwriting (to help cover the unbanked) is not clear. The author did not mention any data to that effect.
Enjoyed the article, but the author was correctly questioned in the substack comments how is this any different than a credit card for the borrower and what justifies the "interest-free" myth here, since the BNPL payoff period largely overlaps with the CC grace period. To which the author responds:
> Credit card float only lasts if you pay the full statement balance by the due date
but that is identical to BNPL, it's only interest free if you pay it off, just like a credit card past grace period. So why repeat the "interest free" marketing slogan? yes, initially it is, and so is the CC grace period.
> consumers have to only forecast the next six weeks of their life
yeah, good luck managing timing on the payments if you have 12+ of these, and it's not uncommon to have that many! Especially if, as author mentioned, you are living paycheck-to-paycheck.
I guess a marginal benefit for consumer is soft-forcing them to pay it off instead of revolving. Another one, correctly, was less hit to the credit score unless and until the bureaus get their hands on all BNPL data at some point in the future. But there is really no magic here for the consumer.
if they are optimizing for cost, which they are obviously not, then of course it would take them less to build. If they are optimizing for time, and the actual aforementioned "vibe code" step may not even be the most time-consuming part, then yes, it may be the right price.
it still takes time to spec out, build and sell to a comparable size user base, even with 10 people. And you're not guaranteed the same results if you just try to clone all of that. If the price is right, why not take the shortcut.
Speaking for one of those metro areas I'm familiar with: maybe in SF city limits specifically (where they still are half the Uber's share), but that's 10% of the population of the Bay Area metro. I'm very much looking forward to the day when I can take a robo cab from where I live near Google to the airport - preferably, much cheaper than today's absurd Uber rates - but today it's just not present in the lives of about 95+% of Bay Area residents.