What type of applications are y'all seeing from LLMs? Anecdotally the only thing that has changed for me is the ability to output more code. That's not software. My coworker is a 10x vibe-coder and his flagship application is held together with brittle shell scripts, a sloppy codebase, bad abstractions, piles of markdown files and an ouroboros of generated tests. This is not software. This is just held together with duct tape and a prayer. Although this guy doesn't have any traditional background but still, if LLM generated coding agents were so good even a simpleton like himself should be able to create a miraculous piece of software, right?

the 0x engineer became a 10x vibe-coder responsible for our CICD and vibe-coded testing that was previously manual

He's introduced several 100,000s LoC changes and additions in 10-15 codebases. There are some repos that only he works in ( so no PRs, just merge to master and be done ). He also has self-approved and merged changes without review (he's an admin)

Anyway, now he put in his notice and no one on his team knows how any of this works. We can't get code changes without CICD passing. CICD breaks all the time. The original contractor who made the CICD before him wants nothing to do with it now. We can't generate signed OTA packages.

He went from doing 'too much to finish anything' to 'made so many changes that he had to bypass PRs'.

Now he's leaving.

Engineers have been pointing out this bottleneck for the past year or so. The engineering managers aren't pushing it and the business owners either don't understand or don't care

Software has, with precious few exceptions, almost always been held together with duct tape and a prayer.

Why would it? You still need to be able to understand and describe a problem (if the space is complex, that usually means: many connected problems) and that requires good thinking.

> brittle shell scripts, a sloppy codebase, bad abstractions, piles of markdown files and an ouroboros of generated tests. This is not software

I think that's software. It's not good software, but it's software.

This perspective feels a bit like a chef insisting McDonalds or frozen dinners aren't food. It's mass produced, unoriginal, and typically soulless, but it's still food. As Scott would say, maybe a map vs territory discussion.

I built an orchestrator connected to email, browser and payments, and it handles a ton of boring stuff like “pay electricity”, or “apt renters want something, deal with that”, or scheduling appointments, dealing with infoline chatbots and everything around that.

Plus navigating personal communication (what’s the address of friend X, who did I promise to go to a dance workshop with) and so on…

In essense, anything Siri promised to be, but really working.

> his flagship application is held together with brittle shell scripts, a sloppy codebase, bad abstractions, piles of markdown files and an ouroboros of generated tests

you just described lots of codebases at highly values companies. Plenty of places, maybe even the majority, do not care about code quality if the code results in a functional application.

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