Hardly. Claude Code is basically just a wrapper around an LLM with a CLI.

Obviously it does some fairly smart stuff under the hood, but it's not exactly comparable to a large software project.

But to your point, that doesn't mean you can't vibe code some poorly built product and sell it. But people have always been able to sell poorly built software projects. They can just do it a bit quicker now.

My understanding of OP was not a claim that "vibe coding doesn't work", but that the way Anthropic does it doesn't work. He seems to be specifically criticizing the "hands off the actual code, human" approach and advocating for keeping the human in the loop.

There is already lots of popular software that is violates any concept of good software. Facebook messenger, instagram, twitter, minecraft, balena etcher, the original ethereum wallet, almost anything that uses electron...

Except for the part where it's constantly having quality and reliability issues, even independent of the server-side infrastructure (OOMs on long running tasks, etc).

> It’s truly strange that people keep citing the quality of Claude code’s leaked source as if it’s proof vibe coding doesn’t work.

It's not a proof vibe-coding doesn't work. It's a proof it's shitty, rube-goldberg, crappy code. It doesn't mean there aren't other shitty products out there (the heavy turds Microsoft produced throughout the years do comes to mind for example).

But when you've got a project upvoted here recently complaining that people do run into issue while quickly cut/pasting from Claude Code CLI to, say, Bash to test something because of Unicode characters in Claude Code CLI's output... And when you realize that it's because what Claude Code CLI shows you in the TUI is not the output of the model because there's an entire headless browser rendering the model's output to a webpage, which is then converted to text (and changing at that moment ASCII chars for Unicode ones), you realize that some serious level of fucktardery is ongoing.

It's normal that at times people aren't going full agentic and shall want to cut/paste what they see. I'm not the one complaining: I saw a project complaining about it and people are affected by that terribly dumb ASCII-to-Unicode conversion of characters.

When you can produce turds by the kilometer, a near infinity of turd is going to be produced.

We're not saying it's not working: I pay an Anthropic subscription and use it daily... We're saying it's a piece-of-shit of a codebase.

Shit that works is still shit.

If anyone from Anthropic is reading: STOP FUCKING CHANGING THE CHARACTERS THAT YOUR MODEL DOES OUTPUT.

(now of course it's just one issue out of thousands, but it'd be a nice one to fix)

I found that to be true years ago when I spooled the source of the Twitch leaks.

To me it said, clearly: nobody cares about your code quality other than your ability to ship interesting features.

It was incredibly eye-opening to me, I went in expecting different lessons honestly.

> It shows that you can build a crazy popular & successful product while violating all the traditional rules about “good” code.

That was always the case. Landlords still want rent, the IRS still has figurative guns. Shipping shit code to please these folks and keep the company alive will always win over code quality, unless the system can be edited to financially incentivize code quality. The current loss function on society is literally "ship shit now and pay your taxes and rent".

>. It shows that you can build a crazy popular & successful product while violating all the traditional rules about “good” code.

The product is also a bit wonky and doesn't always provide the benefits it's hyped for. It often doesn't even produce any result for me, just keeps me waiting and waiting... and nothing happens, which is what I expect from a vibe coded app.

[dead]

Yes, just get hundreds of billions of dollars in investments to build a leading product, and then use your massive legal team to force the usage of your highly subsidised and marketed subscription plan through your vibe coded software. This is excellent evidence that code doesn't matter.

I don't think anyone who used Claude code on the terminal had anything good to say about it. It was people using it through vs code that had a good time.