The other weird part has been feeling the rift inside myself – the part that's a craftsman mourning the old ways, and the part that can't help but notice what's coming and is both terrified and curious about it.

I used to take code quality *very* seriously – I sweated every semicolon – but now I'm starting to wonder if the slop-slingers are seeing something I don't. That they're playing a completely different game, and there's no sense judging them by the rules of a game they're not playing.

@nolan What's missing in a lot of this conversation is the systemic effect. Same as we saw in the mad rush to React et. al., the assumption of people who say "oh, this makes X better" is that they are generally self-reporting, failing to measure baseline quality, or even do longitudinal analysis of how things net out over moderate time frames.

Quality *can* go down. And when code is cheap, guardrails are the compliment (and therefore become relatively more valuable).

@slightlyoff Oh absolutely, I've noticed a few things:

- Everyone is just going off vibes (there are maybe good reasons for this; the benchmarks don't tell you much IMO)
- Even among vibecoders there is disagreement about whether you should just be a slop cannon ("the code is a binary, the spec is source") or use agents to refine the output for higher quality (I lean this way of course).

I think a lot of unmaintainable junk is being written, and some folks are hoping the models will outrun it.

@nolan The very worst takes seem to be of the "tech debt is free" variety. Even if it's much cheaper, cheap !== free, and that difference matters *enormously* for what happens next.

My relatively strong suspicion is that paying "full freight" for models (when that happens) will not deter folks in domains where output quality is decent, but that the cost curves for both tail risks (quality, tech debt, etc.) and running costs will pull excesses back and/or orgs will accelerate straight into walls