> For example, Steve Yegge's "beads" system is over a quarter million lines of allegedly vibe-coded Go code. But developing a CLI like that may be a sweet spot

Is that really a success? I was just reading an article talking about how sloppy and poorly implemented it is: https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/1/18/agent-psychosis/

I guess it depends on what you’re looking to get out of it.

I'd say it is a success at being useful, but yeah it does seem like the code itself has been a bit of a mess.

I've used a version that had a bd stats and a bd status that both had almost the same content in slightly different formats. Later versions appear to have made them an alias for the same thing. I've also had a version where the daemon consistently failed to start and there were no symptoms other than every command taking 5 seconds. In general, the optimization with the daemon is a questionable choice. It doesn't really need to be _that_ fast.

And yet, even after all of that it still has managed to be useful and generally fairly reliable.

I haven't looked into it deeply, but I've seen people claiming to find it useful, which is one metric of success.

Agentic vibe coding maximalists essentially claim that code quality doesn't matter if you get the desired functionality out of it. Which is not that different from what a lot of "move fast and break things" startups also claim, about code that's written by humans under time, cost, and demand pressure. [Edit: and I've seen some very "sloppy and poorly implemented" code in those contexts, as well as outside software companies, in companies of all sizes. Not all code is artisanally handcrafted by connoisseurs such as us :]

I'm not planning to explore the bleeding edge of this at the moment, but I don't think it can be discounted entirely, and of course it's constantly improving.