>However for my own code for my professional job no way I would go that fast because I would impact millions of users

Tech-savvy people might understand this feeling, but those who are responsible for hiring will easily proceed with another candidate that goes fast.

When push comes to shove, then, programmers will opt to have food to eat over handling technical debt generation.

The trick is to keep a layer of management or engineering below you that can be blamed if things go wrong.

Yeah I vibe coded an addition game for my 4 year old that lets him do addition problems where the answer is always 10 or less. It’s very “juicy”. There’s a lot of screen shake and spinning and flashy rainbow insanity going on. If I had done all that stuff myself it would have take a week because I would have been picky about each little animation. The thing that saved me the most time was just being ok with the good enough animations the ai spit out.

It’s amazing for him and it works on his iPad.

However when I tried it on my iPhone it was a broken mess. Completely unusable (not because of screen size differences).

I tried getting Claude to fix it but it couldn’t do it without changing too much of the look and feel, so I dug into the code and it was thousands of lines of absolute madness. I know from using this at work that there are things I could have done. Write tests to lock in things I like etc…

But so much of the speed up was about not caring about the specifics that once I started caring about making an actual product, I was not much faster maybe not any faster at all. The bottleneck in writing a game was never in banging out code.

> It is insane that companies think they can replace teams wholesale while maintaining quality.

The assumption is that AI will continue to improve. If we get another one or two quality jumps over the next 1-3 years, which is not totally unreasonable, AI quality might be good enough.

> I probably did what would take one team 6 montns and produced it myself in one month.

I find it… Amusing? That’s not quite the word. That programmers—a group notoriously for making wrong estimates of how long something will take to build—continuously and confidently spew a version of this.

And it’s not even estimating how long we ourselves would take to build something, now we’re onto estimating what an undetermined team of completely made up strangers could do. It’s bonkers. It has no basis in reality.

A missing link right now is automated high-quality code reviews. I would love an adversarial code review agent that has a persona oriented around all incoming code being slop, that leverages a wealth of knowledge (both manually written by the team and/or aggregated from previous/historical code reviews). And that agent should pull no punches when reviewing code.

This would augment actual engineer code reviews and help deal with volume.