The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

https://bramcohen.com/p/the-cult-of-vibe-coding-is-insane

The Cult Of Vibe Coding Is Insane

Bad software is a choice you make

Bram’s Thoughts

It’s truly strange that people keep citing the quality of Claude code’s leaked source as if it’s proof vibe coding doesn’t work.

If anything, it’s the exact opposite. It shows that you can build a crazy popular & successful product while violating all the traditional rules about “good” code.

Bad code works fine until it doesn't. In my experience, with humans, doing the right thing is worth it over doing the bad thing if your time horizon is a few months. Once you're in years, absolutely do the right thing, you're actually throwing time away if you don't. And I don't mean "big refactor", I mean at-change-time, when you think "this change feels like an icky hack."

For LLMs, I don't really know. I only have a couple years experience at that.

If you make a working and functional bad code, and put it on maintenance mode, it can keep churning for decades with no major issues.

Everything depends on context. Most code written by humans is indeed, garbage.

I define maintenance mode as: given over to different team, so not my problem anymore.

> 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.