alt Hacker NewsWhat are these "others" shipping, slopware? Agents are not a "magical software factory", they are a tool with a lot of limitations, but which can speed up development in a sustainable way, when used wisely. And that includes configuring it in a way that complements the other tools in our toolkit.
Everyone's waking up to this simple truth: vibe coding like there's not tomorrow accumulates conceptual and technical debt at a unsustainable rate. Then when the "magical factory" gets mired in its own mess, it's back to the drawing board. This is the also what the makers of pi have discovered, if you listen to their talks about how pi came about. I don't believe there are any justification for the assumptions you make about their approach, nor am I seeing you presenting any either. As it is, you take just feels peevish and unfair, to be honest.
A story to share: friend vibe coded absolute slop with Replit starting late 2024 (!!). Absolute trash code. Hacked multiple times because his login code exposed the full user list on the FE (!!!). Hacker found a way to exploit his account confirmation email because it was all front-end and sent an email to every customer telling them he was hacked. One time called me up in a panic asking why his web page was randomly refreshing (turns out, he was serving it in dev mode via Vite with HMR). It was mistake after mistake after mistake.
But he started to get customers. First a handful, then a dozen, then enough to get legal threats from other vendors, and this year, his first "enterprise" deal providing software in a space that was long dominated by a duopoly of legacy providers.
Guess what he did? Just rewrote it with the latest models and hired one engineer to ensure agents followed better practices. It's a legit business now built by a tiny team using a magical software factory to produce absolute trash code, but in shipping it, he found a market and customers willing to pay him for an alternative to the duopoly.
See, at the end of the day, it's cute that you have the perfectly tuned harness, but that also means whatever time you spent tuning your harness, reading up on Pi, spending tokens on your custom plugins -- all of that time and resources could have been used just building something useful.