> The people who most argue for vibe coding will themselves never accept responsibility for the technical outcomes.
This is right, and don’t think this isn’t all partially fueled by spite. I’m not sure if engineers understand how much they’ve been simultaneously reviled/revered by non-technical people. They see this as a Prometheus moment. They would love to vibecode a mess and make the engineers deal with the details.
> grinds its way to profitability over 3 years, can't raise, and grows 15% / year.
You've been a part of some successful ventures! I've worked at places that grind their way to an uneventful shutdown over 3 years, can't raise, can't hire, can't scrape together a GTM plan, can't land on an MVP, and grow 0% / year.
> Nowadays carriages are split between 'normal' and 'quiet'... And the number of quiet carriages seems to have increased over time... It's like there are forces in society which try to prevent people with different experiences from sharing their experiences.
In the USA at least, people in the normal cars aren't "sharing their experiences". They're playing garbage music from their iPhone speakers (technically not allowed - happens anyway), trying to subdue their giggling/crying/screaming children, loudly conversing amongst themselves, etc. It's a zoo.
Not trying to pick apart your post, I liked reading it in general.
> Each business domain is divided into a fixed set of layers, with strictly validated dependency directions and a limited set of permissible edges. These constraints are enforced mechanically via custom linters (Codex-generated, of course!) and structural tests.
> The diagram below shows the rule: within each business domain (e.g. App Settings), code can only depend “forward” through a fixed set of layers (Types → Config → Repo → Service → Runtime → UI). Cross-cutting concerns (auth, connectors, telemetry, feature flags) enter through a single explicit interface: Providers.
This sounds so much like CQRS/hexagonal/DDD/other stuff. This is like the stuff that real world software teams actually struggle to execute on. This is the stuff people want solved. I don't think anyone doubts that if you can nail some sort of rigid, well-defined architecture and tooling workflow, agents can fly on filling in implementation. But it's the first part that needs solving.
You've never tried to compile NextJS slop, have you? It absolutely can take that much. All those junkdevs have 64GB in their MBPs for a reason. NodeJS max heap is now dynamic because of this.
Albert, nice to meet you. Let me be the first to say I'm impressed by your generous casual dress policy for remote work. My current employer makes me wear a 9-piece tuxedo with cummerbund while I work from the comfort of my home office. They inspect me via webcam every day to ensure I'm dressed appropriately. It is humiliating.
Hard to have sober talk about this since a lot of discourse is AI psychosis vs. AI naysayers. Does software quality seem to have taken a jump in the past few years to anyone? Not to me, seems to be getting worse. Think that's a decent signal. Can tell you I'm dealing with a non-technical VP who loves blast submitting vibe-coded PRs and while there's some quick wins, overall quality is bad, and we had our first real production outage that Claude one-shot caused but could not one-shot solve.
We sound similar, I've had some adventures on AngelList. Made an absolute killing, back when that was possible.
My total lifetime "ate it" figure is only $2k, and even that one the client kind of eventually offered to pay, but I just let it be because I wanted to put as much distance between myself and them for other reasons.
Best advice in the article? "Trust your gut". If something feels vaguely off, I walk away immediately. I can see those non-paying incubators coming a mile away. Biggest indicator beyond gut: do they have existing contractors who seem happy? Ask them pointblank if they're getting paid. Easy as that. And of course, if they are paying you, but then stop paying you, or delay paying you, then stop work immediately.
Prescribed workflows apply solutions from the wrong direction.
Determine what's impeding your organization, devise a solution.
The last guy I encountered who evangelized something like this had smart frames and a Lovecraft anthology prominently perched in the background of his Zoom shot.
What sql client is going to hand you raw text?
> Hmm - wouldn’t it be great if the object tracked changes and could save itself.
Lost me there.