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.