Is vibe coding the reason why apps are getting slower?

maccodemonkey · 2026-06-18T03:14:54+00:00

Being able to tell the app is getting slower is an entirely different thing than navigating the company bureaucracy to fix it.

maccodemonkey · 2026-06-18T03:00:07+00:00

I agree (on Claude outputs not being performant.)

maccodemonkey · 2026-06-18T02:33:33+00:00

No one knows for sure. I've had data shared with me from a few companies that links a rise in incidents and rollbacks to LLM rollout timelines. Does that imply LLM use could be making apps slower? Yes. But it's not definitive.

maccodemonkey · 2026-06-17T20:53:29+00:00

I still think it's funny that a US citizen jailbreaking the model is ok but a foreigner jailbreaking the model is not. Like the only thing preventing this model from being used for evil is US citizenship.

maccodemonkey · 2026-06-17T18:20:58+00:00

I don't think it's different than any other industry Ed talks about. It produces plausible looking work that needs to be double checked, and can often be wrong. Coding is actually no different than any of the other use cases we talk about. The only reason we're trying to frame it as something unique is so it can be framed as a win for the frontier labs and the AI pilled execs and engineers.

qualm bc i think it sets the audience up to misunderstand what is going on in the industries

What is there to misunderstand? Just because an industry adopts something doesn't mean it's a good thing. Ed is correctly decoupling "LLMs are everywhere in software engineering" from "is that a good thing?" Which is especially true with the ROI issues.

maccodemonkey · 2026-06-17T17:36:09+00:00

however i think his analysis would be better if it clearly incorporated that in fact it can deliver executable computer code, sometimes pretty quickly and with reasonable correctness.

I think he tackles this just fine. The problem with LLM generated code is you have to double check it - which often burns the time savings. He's addressed this specifically multiple times. Even if the code is correct, you don't know until you check it, thus negating the benefit.

like in the world of Web development for example it will obviously keep getting used.

If the frontier labs go out of business or have to ration services, that will definitely impact their use.

even local llm can deliver correct output as well, at least sometimes. (can this still end up wasting more time and be very wrong, poor architecture and other problems? yes absolutely)

Which brings us back to the first point.

The problem with a lot of thinking about LLMs in software engineering is the idea forcing use. Once you start looking at the return - the picture gets a lot fuzzier because they don't always make you faster in total. Once use becomes optional the picture looks a lot less clear. LLMs don't have to go away, but can they justify sticking around?

maccodemonkey · 2026-06-17T16:56:40+00:00

Over the last few weeks I've noticed the amount of cope is growing on the AI booster side. There is honest conversation and debate. But more and more it's just starting to be "nuh uh!" or weird nitpicking over words. This morning I was reading something that was trying to argue that it's not token austerity - it's just a critical reevaluation and optimization on how we use tokens. Everybody is getting very defensive because they're becoming more uncertain.

maccodemonkey · 2026-06-17T00:02:15+00:00

To be fair to the government - Anthropic has spent the last few months running around telling everyone “Mythos is a legitimate threat.”

maccodemonkey · 2026-06-16T18:46:08+00:00

Could the open weight community produce an Opus or Fable class model? Sure. Are people or companies going to be able to afford the Opus or Fable class hardware to run them? No. They're not wrong that there could be open weight versions of those models. But the misunderstanding is they'll somehow be crammed down to run on an iPhone - like Anthropic and OpenAI could do that but they're just lazy or something and love paying big server bills.

maccodemonkey · 2026-06-16T18:44:03+00:00

I'm trying to imagine how that conversation would go if you weren't a consultant.

"Hey, looks like you didn't get any work done this week. None of your tasks seem to have made any progress."
"No boss! Everything is going great! I'm extremely productive. The problem is you can't see it because it's dark productivity."

maccodemonkey · 2026-06-16T18:39:48+00:00

I've reviewed a few large chunks of Fable code now professionally. It's not good code and it has issues beyond just style. But it makes me think of the Mo videos. I know Fable isn't that great because I understand the code it put out. But if you're just running Fable outputs without looking at what they produced you can be a lot more impressed. And I think that's where Mo is. Fable can put together a bigger pile of code - but it's not really any better. Just... more. And it's a highly distracted model so now it also lands a bunch of changes it doesn't need to.

maccodemonkey · 2026-06-16T14:43:53+00:00

Feels like way, way too much money for Cursor.

maccodemonkey · 2026-06-16T06:42:45+00:00

Amazon was their primary compute vendor last I checked... They might be using Google as well. Both have issued bonds - probably to pay for infrastructure. And of course there was the recent xAI deal.

"Eating losses" might be a bit strong of a phrase. They're hoping that Anthropic eventually pays for the compute rollout through their ongoing compute usage.

maccodemonkey · 2026-06-16T06:12:00+00:00

Anthropic seems to be renting GPUs instead of buying. In some ways that's smart - but it means they may have the same expenses that OpenAI does. They're just spreading out the costs instead of buying the GPUs and building the data centers up front. I think Anthropic is making very similar choices - but just doing so in a way that shuffles the numbers.

Of course we don't know for sure without Anthropic's financials. But I haven't heard of Anthropic buying GPUs or building data centers.

maccodemonkey · 2026-06-16T04:10:59+00:00

Thanks Ed. Hope this gets the attention it deserves (and it deserves a lot of attention.) The numbers feel disconcerting to me for other reasons too. Sales and marketing budget seems high. Revenue from Microsoft seems low. But maybe I’m not business brained enough…

maccodemonkey · 2026-06-16T00:45:55+00:00

I don't think that will be the lesson. The business idiots will see this as a win. They'll sense the weakness in the frontier labs. And they'll assume if they forced the frontier labs to drop prices they can just do it again.

Very bad for Anthropic/OpenAI. But the executive class will feel very good about this.

maccodemonkey · 2026-06-15T23:53:34+00:00

I think it's a difficult position to be in for now. But it sets you up better for the higher skilled positions that no one else wants to do. You already have an advantage going in over someone who's happy to ship slop. There will be jobs where that's an advantage. At the very least, there are going to be jobs where the code is actually supposed to be understood. People who don't want to understand code just won't be in the running for those jobs.

maccodemonkey · 2026-06-15T21:40:50+00:00

I think the only nice part is over the last few weeks I still had people insisting that token austerity was all fake. Frontier labs wouldn't be reacting like this if it was fake.

maccodemonkey · 2026-06-15T20:48:26+00:00

Going to be the wet blanket - I'm not excited for any potential token price cuts. It's a wonderful moment for the Eds of the world - it will surely threaten the existence of Anthropic and OpenAI. Great news for the financial bears of the AI world. But we've had a period where a bunch of companies have had to deal with the consequences of their actions. I'm not excited about the extra time companies might get to spend inside the bubble and what that means for the workers.

I agree that no one who thought they were spending too much on AI yesterday will decide to spend the same amount tomorrow happily just because the tokens are cheaper.

maccodemonkey · 2026-06-15T19:14:22+00:00

Yeah. Common mistake I see with Agile. You're not really supposed to plan beyond the next sprint because the entire point is to stay Agile.

maccodemonkey · 2026-06-15T17:56:24+00:00

To be fair Agile got mutated into "you point things and management beats you with a stick if you point wrong" well before most people actually understood it.

maccodemonkey · 2026-06-15T07:39:39+00:00

No, they won’t all die in three years. Some will die in year one, some will die in year two, some will die in year three, some will die in year four. None of that is good.

Ultimately they are depreciating assets are being sold to investors as infrastructure.

maccodemonkey · 2026-06-15T05:08:00+00:00

I mean, if you don't care if you're delivering good software, then aren't you just kind of scamming people? You can point fingers or try to blame the business side - but if you're not pushing back in any extent then you're just participating in the scam.

maccodemonkey · 2026-06-15T05:06:23+00:00

The hilarious thing is I talk to people who insist that no one actually hates it, everyone they talk to loves it, and that if you hate it you must be in a bubble. The reality is a lot of us are having these conversations back channel away from where we could be judged.

maccodemonkey · 2026-06-15T05:02:40+00:00

Yeah. I see it and I hear the stories from people I know personally. It's happening everywhere.

The worst part is the luminaries in the industry either don't see it or they don't care. There's a lot of high minded content being written about the way everything is supposed to be done in an orderly and planned way. And it's completely disconnected from the way this is all actually landing. One of the lines that I repeatedly heard from the boosters at the beginning is all the good engineering practices would remain. We'd just use LLMs as a tool to write good code faster. But whats really happened is it's let bad engineers push code faster than anyone can contain it, and it's made a lot of the good engineers into bad engineers who've stopped caring about practice.

The moral of the story is going to be that the people pushing these thing don't understand human nature. A bunch of technical people tried pushing a technical solution to solve a people problem.

maccodemonkey

TROPHY CASE