This article resonated tremendously with me, speaking as someone who has been coding since the 1980s and had to develop my own taste the hard way, through lots and lots of mistakes. Whenever I see a software demo built by someone mostly using agents to do the work, I have to question whether it's any good on the inside - or whether any real intuition or judgment went into its design. On the flip side, maybe none of that matters anymore - as long as it works, who cares how it was built.
It resonated with me too, and even as a once fairly prolific coder that now uses agents to do all the coding, I feel like this is all relevant and does matter. The agent does whatever you ask and provides thin judgements based on what it thinks is your motivation and context, even feeding it the context it will often make bad generic choices. I think this is the part hard to optimize because it's not a verifiable reward, it's the feel of the software. I think Herdr is a great example, I've tried several dozen terminal multiplexers / session aggregators and they are all vibed and different, but this one felt so much better to use because of its choices and actually increased the number of parallel sessions I was able to keep going. My own projects I find I have to stress every detail, that is what makes the software good now is really diving into it, the experience feels like just as much of a craft as coding was and 'taste' captures the concept for me.
I wonder, when you have a McDonald's McDouble, do you really care how it was made or do you just care that it's yummeroni and costs $2.99?
it is profitable to sell McDoubles, since they are popular and cheap, but McDonalds CEO doesnt eat its own burgers
https://www.reddit.com/r/popculturechat/comments/1rhug58/mcd...
so it is profitable to sell vibecoding tools, but its unlikely to be consumed by "serious organizations"
That is a significant leap in logic. A vibecoding tool is not a McDouble. Nor is Chris Kempczinski the same person as Dario Amodei.
The biggest difference is that there are only so many ways to eat a McDouble, but you can actually wield a vibe coding tool with skill. There's nothing stopping you from looking at the code and asking for structural reworks or refactors that please your code taste. In fact one of the best use cases for AI coding tools is vibe refactoring old apps where the code is straight up horrible.
People who care about their health aren't ignorant about that. I think that can apply to software too: if you care about safety or privacy you might think twice before using vibe-coded software.
it is profitable to sell McDoubles, since they are popular and cheap, but McDonalds CEO doesnt eat its own burgers
so it is profitable to sell vibecoding tools, but its unlikely to be consumed by "serious organizations"