AI makes writing code cheaper. It makes understanding code more valuable.
The bottleneck is shifting from “Can you produce this code?” to “Can you tell whether this code is actually good?”
My two cents
Opinion
Short takes on building software. A line or two, whatever I actually think. No essays. You’re allowed to disagree.
Saw a funny meme:
I code, you review: $500
You vibe-code, I review: $5,000
Vibe coding makes building software cheaper, but maintaining badly built software can cost you far more.
Kent Beck said he wasn’t a great programmer, just a good one with great habits. The habits are the part the models never picked up. They will write you the code, but nothing in them wants to write the test first, or pair on the hard bit, or stop and refactor while it’s still green.
For a year I typed every exam question into that system myself. A hundred and thirty-odd sets, usually after dinner, always the night before. In August I built the teachers an editor and lost the job. Best thing I shipped all year.
The problem with the app AI built you over a weekend isn’t the code. It’s that when it breaks on a Saturday, there is exactly one person who can go and look at it, and it’s you.
Every system works on demo day. That is more or less what demo day is for. The thing worth asking about is the fourth time it got used in anger.
“It needs a rewrite” is hardly ever about the code. Nine times in ten it means nobody wants to open the one file everything depends on, and proposing a rewrite is a respectable way of saying so.
It built exactly what was asked for. Nobody asked for backups, so there aren’t any. The AI wasn’t being careless. It was being obedient, which is the harder problem to spot.
Picking the exotic option feels like ambition at the time. Two years on it is a maintenance bill with nobody left in the building who can read it.
A business running on WhatsApp and spreadsheets isn’t disorganised. Usually it’s the opposite. One person is holding the whole thing together in their head, flawlessly, and hasn’t taken a proper holiday in three years.
Four hundred lines land in a pull request and get approved ninety seconds later. Whatever that is, it isn’t review.
Half the owners who ask me about hiring a CTO don’t need one. They need one person whose actual job is deciding, so that it stops being them by default.