> You have enough budget for only the first floor, but you have a big family, and you know you’ll want a second one in a couple of years. > Adding the infrastructure to support a 2nd floor is MUCH cheaper right now than it will be when you actually want that 2nd floor.

The problem with this thinking is it requires certainty about the future. It's much cheaper right now IF AND ONLY IF you end up needing the thing. If you don't need it, then you've threw time and money down the drain.

Where I think this analogy weakens is you probably have far more certainty of whether or not you want a big family then you do on whether or not a new product line will see major adoption.

This is all caused because no-one understands the purpose of quality in software

Low quality = cascading bugs, issues, slow to iterate and add or change features

This is just as true for human written as it is for AI

Instead we have everyone giving up on code quality as if it was just "beautiful code" perfectly indented that was only there for people to ooh and aah at

Even if you do use AI tools to help you write the code, at some level you have to specify what the program's output should be for every possible input.

By loosely specifying things in a prompt, there's simply not enough context for the AI tool to know the "right" output to produce for all possible inputs. What's "right" is often subjective anyway ("Should this button be red or blue?").

Medical doctors mostly follow standard procedure and decision trees.

My manager who vibe coded our entire webapp in claude design. Has difficulty understanding why its still not production ready.

My job is to wire to our backend data, and a lot of these wiring require me to be in there and actually think about the features. These take time, and I just haven't figure out a way to speed this process up with Claude.

Because smarter for an LLM isn't operating on the same scale as human intelligence

Making a calculator a billion times "smarter" isn't going to make it able to wash dishes

This would be a great point if his manager asked him to wash the dishes. Who knows, in 10 years time if he finds himself with such a job he might consider himself lucky.

Anyway I hope I get an answer to my actual questions. Engaging with your "it's just a calculator" denialism is an obvious dead-end. Have a good day buddy.

Why isn't a LLM as smart as a human? Therein lies your problem.

Yeah, I have 2 clients that are now obsessed with vibe coding. They seem to understand the realities.

Is it big data? Claude should be able to tell you what to do and give you scripts to deploy anything behind a web app.

> "Never really finish building it" is the key insight.

The problem with software is that it is never done. There is always another feature you could have and worse than building a property the work is only done by the people on the outside.

I think it's deeper than that, once you know software is never done you have to design for constant change.

When clients ask why something takes so long, I explain that I'm not building what you asked for today, I'm building something that will be easy to turn into what you asked for today and possible to turn into whatever you ask for tomorrow.

We’re in the self driving car stage right now. A Waymo can drive itself but the belts and suspenders involved are more expensive than a normal car.

Not OP, but… It can drive itself…mostly (the “belt”). And when it doesn’t, you need remote drivers (the “suspenders”) to get it unstuck. I don’t need that with the car I drive myself, and it probably won’t be needed with self-driving cars (waaaay in the future, IMO).

This is definitely getting my favorite. I’m also going to shamelessly steal this house analogy.

Thanks for writing this!

I've been using it for years. "Let's decide where we want the plumbing to go before pouring the slab", or "let's not focus on where the couch will go before we paint the walls". Or when a 'genius cowboy dev' discovers a super fast way to get from the 2nd floor to the kitchen by cutting a hole in the floor despite all the leaks it causes and how many other people have to work around the change.

The house analogy is great. The extreme is the Winchester Mystery house.

…which is always how I explain legacy code.

TBH I think we still need to explain this to ourselves first.

My experience over many decades is this:

* If a business person thinks a change or new program is very easy to do, it is really a very hard project.

* If a business person thinks the change or new program us hard to do, usually it is a trivial project.

For me, this has been true for well over 40 years. I never use any kind AI for my work, it did not exist before I retired.

This is is relatable but I think the issue is that they are uncorrelated.

If it's easy and the business thinks it's easy it gets done. If it's hard and the business thinks it's hard it doesn't.

XKCD Tasks (from 12 years ago, to the day!) https://xkcd.com/1425/

My experience matches this also. My observation is that most business people think things they know they don't know are hard, and things that they think they do know are easy. My additional observation is that AI tools make business people think they know a lot more things, so they consider a lot more things easy, when they are not. AI tools are a machine that makes business people Dunning-Kruger-max.

It's the rest of the owl.

To me stories like this seem like just a moment in time.

Like in 1 to 5 years, vibe coding without looking at the code will likely be a lot better.