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ryandraketoday at 3:07 AM1 replyview on HN

I have no idea what a “spike” is, but this seems like a good way to build software when there are no consequences to getting it wrong.

What happens if this “spike” violates someone’s patent or puts the company at legal/regulatory risk? What if it leaks users’ personal information? What if it introduces a vulnerability that my 13 year old can exploit? What if it crashes 2 million of your users’ devices because it didn’t anticipate some unusual configuration? What if the code totally conflicts with some other team’s future plans and you didn’t know because they never reviewed it?

This kind of yolo “just try it” development only works if you are very small and low-profile, don’t have hundreds of millions of users, or your software is inconsequential (nobody cares if it goes down or doesn’t work).


Replies

CodeShmodetoday at 6:18 AM

The point not to YOLO in vibe coded slop. It's that with agentic generation you can prove out concepts, features and technical approaches first because it's low cost. Once you have something working you can work on getting alignment.

And yes you should completely grok what you're finally committing, making sure it's fully tested. What it enables is lots of fast experimentation before settling on your final change.

https://www.google.com/search?q=software+spike