> My hope is that we'll see a number of companies collapse as they scale - with basically no hope of rescue

If you worked in SV like I did from 2010-2020 you know that the exact opposite of that will happen. I saw hundreds of companies successfully scale out of their garbage stack such as Facebook and PHP.

The only thing that matters is the problem you’re solving and the quality of the code is irrelevant.

Scaling means something different in this context IMO. It's not whether your DB can go from serving 100 to 10000 users, it's whether your B2B app can serve 100 to 10000 different real world customers without starting to fall apart. While it becomes an unintelligible 40000 line "if else" tree that breaks in a new way every time you open a ticket with your agent to Vibe Jira a fix (but forget to specify 1 out of the hundreds of niche constraints that someone doing the job likely knows from experience). You then ask it to reimplement cleanly, but it basically reimplements the broken mess of business logic you're trying to escape since the current codebase is the only reliable source of truth.

They didn't succeed per-se, they rode a gigantic wave of free money and barely avoided catastrophe.

I think much of what we see there is really heroic efforts: subsystems get swapped out with things that suck less, PHP gets a new optimized runtime, etc. Basically - unsung people do the hard work that rights the ship, meanwhile 10x more people are adding tons of crap and it barely balances out.

Now that 10x is more like 1000x - and if we don't use these tools responsibly, I think we'll see the costs outweigh any kind of benefit.

Or I could be completely wrong. Worse might actually be better. People can vibe up a new replacement thing when the original thing becomes unmaintainable. That feels wrong/gross to me, but maybe I'm just old fashioned (like the old folks from Inmos/Symbolics/Transmeta were).