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?
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
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.
Every dollar spent is a dollar that shareholders can't have and executives can't hope for in their bonuses
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.
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.
The negative emotion regex, for example, is only used for a log/telemetry metric. Sampling "wtf?" along would probably be enough. Why would you use an agent for that?
I don't see how a vibe-coded app is freed from the same trade-offs that apply to a fast-moving human-coded one.
Especially since a human is still driving it, thus they will take the same shortcuts they did before: instead of a formal planning phase, they'll just yolo it with the agent. Instead of cleaning up technical debt, they want to fix specific issues that are easy to review, not touch 10 files to do a refactor that's hard to review. The highest priority issues are bugs and new integrations, not tech debt, just like it always was.
This is really just a reminder of how little upside there is to coding in the open.