In January 2026, prototype code is cheap. Shitty production code is cheap. If that's all you need—which is sometimes the case—then go for it.

But actually good code, with a consistent global model for what is going on, still won't come from Opus 4.5 or a Markdown plan. It still comes from a human fighting entropy.

Getting eyes on the code still matters, whether it's plain old AI slop, or fancy new Opus 4.5 "premium slop." Opus is quite smart, and it does its best.

But I've tried seriously using a number of high-profile, vibe-coded projects in the last few weeks. And good grief what unbelievable piles of shit most of them are. I spend 5% of the time using the vibe-coded tool, and 95% of the time trying to uncorrupt my data. I spend plenty of time having Opus try to look at the source to figure out what went wrong in 200,000 lines of vibe-coded Go. And even Opus is like, "This never worked! It's broken! You see, there's a race condition in the daemonization code that causes the daemon to auto-kill itself!"

And at that point, I stop caring. If someone can't be bothered to even read the code Opus generates, I can't be bothered to debug their awful software.