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.

> you can build a crazy popular & successful product while violating all the traditional rules about “good” code

which has always been true

Yes, and to add, in case it's not obvious: in my experience the maintenance, mental (and emotional costs, call me sensitive) cost of bad code compounds exponentially the more hacks you throw at it
Sure, for humans. Not sure they'll be the primary readers of code going forward

I'm pretty sure that will be true with AI as well.

No accounting for taste, but part of makes code hard for me to reason about is when it has lots of combinatorial complexity, where the amount of states that can happen makes it difficult to know all the possible good and bad states that your program can be in. Combinatorial complexity is something that objectively can be expensive for any form of computer, be it a human brain or silicon. If the code is written in such a way that the number of correct and incorrect states are impossible to know, then the problem becomes undecidable.

I do think there is code that is "objectively" difficult to work with.

What do you think about the argument that we are entering a world where code is so cheap to write, you can throw the old one away and build a new one after you've validated the business model, found a niche, whatever?

I mean, it seems like that has always been true to an extent, but now it may be even more true? Once you know you're sitting on a lode of gold, it's a lot easier to know how much to invest in the mine.

I actually think that might actually be a good path forward.

I hate self-promotion but I posted my opinions on this last night https://blog.tombert.com/Posts/Technical/2026/04-April/Stop-...

The tl;dr of this is that I don't think that the code itself is what needs to be preserved, the prompt and chat is the actual important and useful thing here. At some point I think it makes more sense to fine tune the prompts to get increasingly more specific and just regenerate the the code based on that spec, and store that in Git.

Stop Pushing AI Generated Code to Git

I am not a luddite. I use Claude Code like everyone does. It’s a good tool, you should use it.

Tombert's Blog

> At some point I think it makes more sense to fine tune the prompts to get increasingly more specific and just regenerate the the code based on that spec, and store that in Git.

Generating code using a non-deterministic code generator is a bold strategy. Just gotta hope that your next pull of the code slot machine doesn’t introduce a bug or ten.