alt Hacker NewsI came away with a very different conclusion, which is that the fact that such “bad” software can be so resoundingly successful for a business, yet be so odious to experienced human reviewers, means that it was the right engineering choice to go fast, rather than “do things right” by emphasizing code quality.
What good would it truly be if a 3K line function is split into 8 modules? It’ll be neater and more comprehensible to a human reader. More debuggable, definitely.
But given the business problem the have: winner takes all of a massive market, first mover wins, — the right move is to throw the usual rulebook about quality software out the window, and double down on the bets of the company, that AI will make human code engineering less and less necessary very quickly.
It turned out incredibly well despite the “bad” engineering — which in this case, I really count as good engineering.
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But it is working primarily because of the Max subscription model. If I could use my Max subscription to get $5000 worth of tokens for only $200 via OpenCode or Pi, I would drop Claude Code today. I think a lot of people (and enterprises) are of a similar opinion. Not saying Claude Code would have no users, but its dominance would be greatly diminished.
Successful over what time frame? It's way too early to declare victory.
You can go just as fast if you make good code, you just have to burn more tokens to do it. The tokens you burn in strict structure and documentation you’ll save in debugging as the codebase grows. I’m 5-30x my normal production depending on the day…with zero team and writing better code than I ever have, but you need a robust system to manage the path, and active supervision and management basically you’ll apply your senior dev skills as if you were managing 50 frisky interns.
The argument is that the bad code will result in the companies core product failing.
People notice the jank, and it's affecting CC's reputatio That's not easy to come back from.
It just won't survive, it's that simple.
You get to know before others how the future will play out
It was "good engineering" only because this was a new kind of product and the customers were not aware yet of what they should get for the money they pay.
The bad quality of the Claude Code program has resulted in increased costs for the customers (very high memory consumption, slow execution, higher and sometimes much higher token count than necessary), and even for Anthropic, but nobody was aware of this, because there was no previous experience to compare with.
This kind of sloppy vibe coding works only when there is no competition. When the competition comes with something much more efficient, e.g. pi-dev, the inefficient application will be eliminated.
Anthropic attempts to protect their badly written program by forbidding its customers to use other coding harnesses, but this will not be able to protect them from competition for long.
If you are the first on a new market without competitors, then indeed time-to-market matters more than anything else and the sloppiest vibe-coded application is the best if it can be delivered immediately.
However, one must plan to replace that with a better and more efficient application ASAP, because the advantage of being the first is only temporary.