alt Hacker News> business people don't understand why you can't just put their app in production
I’d flip that around and say that engineers don’t understand that sometimes you _can_ just put their app into production. It might take some cleanup, and some clever ways of deploying it in isolation, but some of these “vibe coded prototypes” — many made by technical business people (they do exist) – are much closer to production-ready than you might initially assume.
I’d encourage you to challenge your assumptions before dismissing the possibility. I’ve personally seen this workflow produce real production code, used by customers, in an extremely rapid feedback loop. Now is the time to adapt, not push back. Keep an open mind or you’ll be left behind.
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I actually agree with you, although I don't agree with the "open your mind or be left behind" sentiment. I left it implicit in my example, but in my actual experience they actually can't put it in production as it is because there are genuine broken things or features they can't add without rewriting big chunks of the system. The worst are the ones that are not obviously broken but are just wrong, like incorrect numbers in a financial report.
But yes, I do agree that some engineers and some engineering teams are slow and cautious where it's not needed, to the point of obstructing rapid prototyping and iteration. And yes I agree that AI will be good to help push them to overcome it.
> Now is the time to adapt, not push back. Keep an open mind or you’ll be left behind.
That’s not the gating factor. Who picks up the liability accountability and picks up the pager duty at o’dark thirty when it breaks in production, that’s the big gate. That long tail of accountability for operational risk weeds out a ton of Eager Ethan’s who want to see something go live yesterday. Because the success of launching has many fathers while the failures in the operational long tail is an orphan.
Get them to sign up for the long tail troubleshooting operations of the product. They are after all, now the SME on the product having built 90% of it. The full promise of AI in such a world is deploying and operating an AI-forward application is an artificial distinction, and full conviction means fully committing to the operational model.
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> Keep an open mind or you’ll be left behind.
An open mind to what? To yolo deployment of dodgy code straight into production? Moving fast and breaking things?
> I’ve personally seen this workflow produce real production code, used by customers, in an extremely rapid feedback loop.
Yes. I've seen it as well. I've also seen what happens. It goes wrong.
Should the engineers building your cars, your house, all other infrastructure also "keep an open mind" to slopping up their work?
Your next words will be "I'm not working on something safety critical".
You are. Even the most basic CRUD app handling personal data of any kind of safety critical these days. Data leaks alone KILL.