3 posts tagged with "productivity"

A post by Günter Richter got me thinking: everyone's rushing to vibe code, but almost nobody talks about the skills that decide whether you succeed or just generate an expensive mess. He's right that the tools don't replace fundamentals — they raise the stakes on them. So here's my own version: the three skills I'd want anyone to have before they let an AI write their software.

I rolled my eyes the first time I heard the phrase "vibe coding." It sounded like something invented to sell a course. Then I actually spent a few weekends doing it — describing what I wanted in plain English, letting an LLM write the code, running it, fixing what broke — and I had to admit the eye-roll was premature. There's something real here. There's also a trap, and most of the hype skips right over it.

So here's my honest take, from someone who ships backend and blockchain code for a living.

Every engineer has been here: staring at the same project they helped launch, now bloated and twisted, and muttering the infamous words — “Let’s rewrite it from scratch.”

But why does this keep happening?

Let’s walk through the typical lifecycle of a software project using the clever chart above that maps Impact against Effort over time.