> and let’s be honest, most code in the wild is pretty bad

Most code in general is bad by some metric, and likely many metrics. Let’s not pretend that closed-source, in-house code is better.

> There is no fitness function you can define for maintainable code, at least not one that we can discern, otherwise it would’ve been baked into our linters.

This is emotionally appealing because it tells me that my judgement is irreplaceable. But it’s also essentially an appeal to magic. A metric than cannot be defined is either not real or is a matter of taste. And maintainability cannot be a question of taste because it makes concrete claims about the software, not just human perception of it.

All this is to say that we have yet to establish that “vibe-coded projects devolve over time into an unmaintainable mess” is a fact, or that it’s more true of vibe coded projects than hand coded projects. We are still learning how to build the right guard rails on vibe coded software because previously we relied a lot on humans reasoning over the code and saying “this looks about right” which frankly is not a strong engineering practice to start with.