. . . yeah, they’re gone.
This is one of the first of the AI-hypes to implode, before it even took off.
I am talking about vibe coding of course. Yeah, you know, the thing that you don’t need to know anything about coding, syntax, design patterns, object orientation and whatnot, but you just can talk your application into life by writing “code” in plain, understandable English.
For the record, I am not talking about AI coding-assistants, like Github’s or Claude Code, meant to speed up software engineering by real skilled software engineers, but the tools that are mostly used by product managers, designers, recruiters, people with time to spend and nothing better to do, and yes, people like me. . .
There’s about 63 of ‘em floating around on the internet somewhere. I’ve even created an overview of the tools, including email adresses so you know where to send your complaints.
And about a year or so, I fell completely in love with the concept. I went full ‘hyperfocus’ and I spent hours ‘coding’ small apps while commuting. Yeah, I was that idiot on the train, grinning at my laptop, “coding” tiny apps like I was hacking the future. Spoiler: I wasn’t. Every single one was a half-finished gremlin. It’s safe to say that with all the energy I put into it, I can cross the 1000 hour treshold, but I have never, ever, finished one app. Not a thing that actually works. They either refused to compile, exploded in bugs like fireworks, or demanded seventeen other dependencies that hated each other on sight.
And frustrated by that, and to channel my anger, I set out to write a couple of gnarly articles about this “phenomenon”.
Read:
- The Web didn’t die, it just got a lobotomy | LinkedIn
- Vibe Coding is gonna spawn the most braindead software generation ever | LinkedIn
- Shocking news about Vibe Coding for absolutely nobody with a functioning brain | LinkedIn
- The day vibe coding jobs got real and half the dev world cried into their keyboards | LinkedIn
After exorcising the rage of a thousand wasted hours hammering code that did nothing but mock me, I finally had my Eureka moment. I sat down, still twitching from the caffeine and taurine overdose, and built myself a framework of 11 domains I swore every so-called “vibe coding” tool was missing. I even wrote an actual paper, like a grown-up. And because I can’t stop at theory, I built MassQ, a tool that generates prompts so your AI-written code doesn’t immediately combust when you dare to deploy it.
Oh, and that was also the day I discovered how to animate my LinkedIn images. The result is utterly horrifying, like PowerPoint transitions times a poorly executed branding exercise to turn the name TechTonic Shifts into a shockingly good anime.
Read: I may have found a solution to Vibe Coding’s technical debt problem | LinkedIn
And the paper.
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Duct-taped disasters
So yeah, this year was special for software developers. And with special I mean like finding a spider in your coffee kinda special. Man, the entire internet collectively lost its mind, and I asked what every keyboard jockey was thinking “Are software engineers toast?”
The vibe was intoxicating.
You didn’t need to understand code.
Hell no.
You just needed to type English language in your silicon slave, and build yourself a Netflix clone before your bagel gets stale. When your boss (Marketing usually) would casually say “you know what I would like us to have? An app that reads every email draft and tells you the emotional temperature before you hit send. But IT is so damn slow”, and you’d go “Sure thing there, boss-man, I’m on it”.
Life was magnificent.
You posted the app, and it went viral in your company because the CEO tweeted that this was a landmark moment, the first time ever that an app was built in under three months. But when more and more users signed up, it crashed. And no-one could fix it. Not even you cause you didn’t know didley squat about coding and solutions architecture. So you hired this vibe-coding-fixer on Fiverr (they really exist) and yeah, he fixed it right, but he also fixed your walled. And in the end, vibe coding an app would cost more than building an app from scratch by a whole software team, and suddenly all those CI/CD pipelines, and DevOps thingies you always despised were all starting to make sense.
And suddenly, the rave ended as fast as it started, the lights came on, and we’re all standing in a warehouse full of broken promises and duct-taped disasters.
Yup.
That vibe-coding revolution crashed harder than my body after a meth fueled writing rave. And that duct-tape code I mentioned? It is peeling off like sunburnt skin.
After a whole 5 months of this “revolution”, the results are in, and they’re chef’s kiss spectacular.
HACK ME DADDY!
Shipping 100 vibe apps is easy. Shipping 1000, yeah, child’s play.
Maintaining one – just ONE – of them, well, that’s when you discover what true suffering feels like.
The core malfunction wasn’t that AI makes mistakes.
Mistakes I can handle.
The problem is the AI’s were wrong, but with the confidence of a Dunning-Kruger consultant†. On the surface, it generates pristine code, so beautifully formatted that you’d swear it was crafted by angels. Then you run it and discover those angels were more like Lucifer after bhis first Python course.
The AI can hallucinate entire libraries “Oh yeah, just import SuperMegaAwesomeLib, yeah man, it definitely exists!”
[Narrator: It did not exist].
Reddit became my favorite horror anthology. By the way, it is not complaints, just developers sharing their descent into madness. They’d burn entire days debugging AI code that was “95% correct”, only to discover that missing 5% was the AI fundamentally misunderstanding what money is, or thinking databases are suggestions. Read: The funniest comments ever left in source code | LinkedIn
We got so horny for speed that we forgot to check if the car even had brakes. Or wheels. Or basic comprehension of physics for that matter.
We thought we bought autopilot. But we got a hyperactive golden retriever chasing your prompts.
Sad-AI Nadella of Microsoft once said “AI is about amplifying human potential, not replacing it”. Yeah, cool story, Satya. Your AI amplified our potential to ship garbage at unprecedented velocity.
Kent Beck (he’s basically the Yoda of software engineering) nailed it when he said “AI assistants… hmm. Excel at inhaling, they do – features add, add, add! But exhaling? Simplicity find? Refactor? Struggle, they must. Breathe out the chaos, they cannot… only inhale until code bloated becomes”.
Lemme mansplain his jibberish “ AI assistants excel at inhaling (adding features) but struggle with exhaling (refactoring for simplicity)”.
A couple of problems these apps are drowning in . . .
SQL injection vulnerabilities so basic they belong in a museum. Hard-coded credentials sitting pretty in plain text. API keys exposed like a flasher at the park. Missing input validation that say “HACK ME DADDY!” Dependencies that exist only in the AI’s imagination.
These are checks that even a hungover junior would catch on Monday morning.
Building for scale requires thinking about hosting, and databases, and rate limiting, and security layers – all that unsexy infrastructure stuff. The AI won’t mention any of this unless you specifically beg, using my MassQ machine.
It’s not a 100X productivity booster. It’s a 100X vulnerability factory operating at full capacity.
† The Dunning–Kruger effect is that cruel psychological glitch where the people who know the least are the most confident, and the ones who actually know things constantly doubt themselves.
The market gets its revenge
Remember those CEOs drafting pink slips for their entire dev teams . . .
[Read: Post | Klarna CEO shows his engineers how to ‘vibe code’ | LinkedIn]
Yeah, they’re now desperately posting “URGENT: Senior Staff Engineer (AI Code Unfucker) – $400k base” job listings.
The panic evaporated.
Reality set in.
Companies discovered their “3x faster vibe coder” is actually their “shipped 10 critical vulnerabilities before lunch” guy.
By “companies” I don’t mean the dinosaur corporations still hazing candidates with LeetCode. They at least filter for basic competence. I mean the startups shipping “minimum viable disasters” at speed.
Real engineers see the truth. AI isn’t replacing senior devs – it’s making them more essential than oxygen. You need someone who can stare at 1,000 lines of AI vomit and ask “But why did you implement authentication using MD5 and prayer?”
Over 50% of tech jobs involve maintaining existing systems, not building castles in the cloud. Good luck getting AI to understand why that 2009 COBOL system can’t be “quickly modernized”.
The future isn’t about “vibe coding”, no matter what the ex-”guy from OpenAI” said. The future is humans validating the dreams of machines.
You’re still the sucker signing the pull request.
Thanks for reading this trainwreck of truth.
Signing off,
Marco
I build AI by day and warn about it by night. I call it job security. Big Tech keeps inflating its promises, and I just bring the pins and clean up the mess.
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To keep you doomscrolling 👇
- I may have found a solution to Vibe Coding’s technical debt problem | LinkedIn
- Shadow AI isn’t rebellion it’s office survival | LinkedIn
- Macrohard is Musk’s middle finger to Microsoft | LinkedIn
- We are in the midst of an incremental apocalypse and only the 1% are prepared | LinkedIn
- Did ChatGPT actually steal your job? (Including job risk-assessment tool) | LinkedIn
- Living in the post-human economy | LinkedIn
- Vibe Coding is gonna spawn the most braindead software generation ever | LinkedIn
- Workslop is the new office plague | LinkedIn
- The funniest comments ever left in source code | LinkedIn
- The Sloppiverse is here, and what are the consequences for writing and speaking? | LinkedIn
- OpenAI finally confesses their bots are chronic liars | LinkedIn
- Money, the final frontier. . . | LinkedIn
- Kickstarter exposed. The ultimate honeytrap for investors | LinkedIn
- China’s AI+ plan and the Manus middle finger | LinkedIn
- Autopsy of an algorithm – Is building an audience still worth it these days? | LinkedIn
- AI is screwing with your résumé and you’re letting it happen | LinkedIn
- Oops! I did it again. . . | LinkedIn
- Palantir turns your life into a spreadsheet | LinkedIn
- Another nail in the coffin – AI’s not ‘reasoning’ at all | LinkedIn
- How AI went from miracle to bubble. An interactive timeline | LinkedIn
- The day vibe coding jobs got real and half the dev world cried into their keyboards | LinkedIn
- The Buy Now – Cry Later company learns about karma | LinkedIn
Portfolio Marco van Hurne 
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