This particular case was extremely unsympathetic, but a critical part of the failure was people being too credulous about the claims of AI providers. They are still refusing to take adequate responsibility for AI "making mistakes" - that is, going completely off the rails.

Now: the CEO gets paid the big bucks and has the least direct accountability, very much because it's their job to take responsibility for people more powerful than them, and likewise the CTO with major commercial software contracts like a Claude subscription. That's why this guy was so hard to take seriously: okay fine, you got burned by Anthropic, stop being a baby about it. Take responsibility for not listening to the critics.

But - to be a little more neutral about my personal distaste - I do think vibe coders are making a very similar mistake to C developers throughout the 90s, where problems with the tooling were not merely dismissed, but actively valorized.

Real Devs use buffers freely and don't make overflow errors.

Real Devs use hands-free agentic development and don't delete production databases.