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

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.

This is actually a pretty good callout.

Observability into how a foundation model generated product arrived to that state is significantly more important than the underlying codebase, as it's the prompt context that is the architecture.

Yeah, I'm just a little tired of seeing these pull requests of multi-thousand-line pull requests where no one has actually looked at the code.

The solution people are coming up with now is using AI for code reviews and I have to ask "why involve Git at all then?". If AI is writing the code, testing the code, reviewing the code, and merging the code, then it seems to me that we can just remove these steps and simply PR the prompts themselves.

> why involve Git at all then?

I made a similar point 3 weeks ago. It wasn't very well received.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47411693

You don't actually need source control to be able to roll back to any particular version that was in use. A series of tarballs will let you do that.

The entire purpose of source control is to let you reason about change sets to help you make decisions about the direction that development (including bug fixes) will take.

If people are still using git but not really using it, are they doing so simply to take advantage of free resources such as github and test runners, or are they still using it because they don't want to admit to themselves that they've completely lost control?