I think the thing is that people expect one of the largest companies in the world to have well written code.

Claude’s source code is fine for a 1-3 person team. It’s atrocious for a flagship product from a company valued over $380 BILLION.

Like if that’s the best ai coding can do given infinite money? Yeah, the emperor has no clothes. If it’s not the best that can be done, then what kinda clowns are running the show over there?

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AstroBen 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The difference here is that everyone else in this product category are also sprinting full steam ahead trying to get as many users as they can

If they DIDN'T heavily vibe-code it they might fall behind. Speed of implementation short term might beat out long-term maintenance and iteration they'd get from quality code

They're just taking on massive tech debt

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kennywinker 7 hours ago | parent [-]

> If they DIDN'T heavily vibe-code it they might fall behind

For you and I, sure - sprint as fast as we can using whatever means we can find. But when you have infinite money, hiring a solid team of traditional/acoustic/human devs is a negligible cost in money and time.

Especially if you give those devs enough agency that they can build on the product in interesting and novel ways that the ai isn’t going to suggest.

Everything is becoming slop now, and it almost always shows. I get why when you’re resource constrained. I don’t get why when you’re not.

	▲	bluefirebrand 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Everything is becoming slop now, and it almost always shows. I get why when you’re resource constrained. I don’t get why when you’re not Every dollar spent is a dollar that shareholders can't have and executives can't hope for in their bonuses

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hombre_fatal 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I just think this is the nature of all software, and it was wrong to assume AI fundamentally changes it.

Seems like you're also under the impression that privately developed software should be immaculate if the company is worth enough billions, but you'd be wrong about that too.

	▲	kennywinker 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I mean, that’s probably part of it. Many times when I have gotten a glimpse under the hood of load-bearing parts of the economy / technology i have been shocked by the mess that i see. Xkcd #2347 is somewhat applicable here. But the trend towards vibe coding is making the cracks in the surface bigger. Like, think why do we even have access to Claude’s source code?

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slopinthebag 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yes, you would expect a company paying millions in TC to the best software developers on the planet could produce a product that is best in class, and you would get code quality for free. Except it's regularly beaten in benchmarks and user validation by open source agents, some built by a single person (pi), with horrible code quality leading to all sorts of bad UX and buggy behaviour.

Either they're massively overpaying some scrubs to underperform with the new paradigm, or they are squeezing every last drop out of vibe coding and this is the result.