These "vibe coders" would never even have thought before, "Oh, maybe I could build a piece of software too."

The barrier to entry has unquestionably dropped dramatically. As long as you have some programming foundation, a several-fold increase in productivity makes it entirely reasonable to choose technology stacks that you would never have seriously considered before. I have a programming background, had never studied WinUI 3, and yet it was still enough for me to build several native Windows applications that made it onto the Microsoft Store.

Of course, the more knowledge you have, the higher your chances of success. Using WinUI 3 again as an example, I definitely cannot fix bugs that Claude itself cannot fix, nor can I see the deeper potential problems beneath the surface. But it works, and that is already quite good. Just look at how many components in Microsoft's own Windows 11 do not work particularly well. That is what it comes down to: the barrier to entry has fallen dramatically, while the marginal returns of deeper learning are diminishing.

As opposed to Very Serious Lifelong Programmers, who, of course, see nothing but success in every project.

Links to a screen shot to some rant bro

Are these chat apps built with one giant monolithic architecture? Seems like you could spin up isolated copies per organization and your scaling needs would be a lot lower and simpler. Then run everything in k8s with over subscription to deal with the compute overhead waste.

This take confuses the value of a project at inception with its value at maturity. Vibe-coded projects are at the beginning of their life. When Slack was at a comparably stage, it similarly didn't have hundreds of engineers running it. So the question facing vibe coding is not whether it can substitute for a mature tech product. The question is if vibe coding can substitute for genuine engineering expertise at the very beginning of a budding, immature project.

How many projects get to the point where they're at 50 or 100 people online at the same time but fail due to technical issues before they reach 50k? I would say very few. 99% of the time the problem is that they never reach that simultaneous 100 people due to other, non-technical issues like not being a product that people really want. If you've got 50k people wanting to use your product it's a success even if you've got technical problems and it's crashing all the time.