I think we're going to see a big scramble to pick up the pieces in a few years when a bunch of vibe-slopped houses of cards come crashing down. I imagine it will be like the demand for COBOL developers but on a much more massive scale.

COBOL was mostly outsourced to India, and it's a terrible professional path for anyone in the EU or US, and has been since the Y2K bugs got fixed at the last minute.

(And probably a bad path in India, too, but I have no data one way or the other. It's just that all the excellent Indian devs I know use almost exactly the same tech stacks I do.)

A few major failures will scare the risk mitigating bejesus out of some kinds of businesses, but maybe AI will be better than us at fixing those kinds of problems by then.

It is, but that isn't how it will be used. The problem isn't the tech, never was, it is how the greedy and stupid deploy it.

And since big-name companies will be dealing with this, nobody will get blamed for not seeing this train barreling down the tracks towards them.

You know that’s not going to happen. Most of us are past the denial stage now, come join us…

Then why did it take Anthropic over a year just to fix the flickering issue in one of their main products when they have internal access to the latest and greatest models?

ThePrimeagen just talked about it on his podcast:

"I Think They Are Lying To You": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfYsSFY4l18

Remember OpenClaw?

You know why nobody talks about it anymore? Because the project has been vibe coded to death in the span of a few months.

Not only will it happen, it's literally happening right now in front of our eyes.

Do you have any evidence that the code quality of OpenClaw is to blame for its decline in popularity?

I would say far more likely is that its creator was acqui-hired and Anthropic banned OpenClaw usage.

The reality is that AI is both capable of producing sloppy code and capable of cleaning it up, if directed to do so, just like humans.

And, just like humans, code quality is very rarely the make or break factor between success and failure in business, much less popularity.

In the case of vibe-coded slop like OpenClaw it's not a question of some vague notion of "code quality", it's a case of the software shitting the bed and not working anymore, with no recourse of fixing it. (Neither humans nor LLMs have the context window to analyse and fix tens of millions of lines of code slop.)

> and Anthropic banned OpenClaw usage

If OpenClaw wasn't broken it would just use a standard token API.

But see above - as software it is fundamentally broken and unfixable.

I sure hope you're right

I'm worried the slop can remain irrational longer than I can remain solvent