This was previously true but no longer. Anyone who sends an email instead of a DM for something requiring a 24 hour turn around bears the responsibility for any resulting delay in 2026.

Look it’s obvious at this point to anyone who is actually using the tools.

We can articulate it but why should we bother when it’s so obvious.

We are at an inflection point where discussion about this, even on HN, is useless until the people in the conversation are on a similar level again. Until then we have a very large gap in a bimodal distribution, and it’s fruitless to talk to the other population.

In practice using someone else’s framework means you’re accepting the risk of the thousands of bugs in the framework that have no relevance to your business use case and will never be fixed.

Yet people still use frameworks, before and after the age of LLMs. Frameworks must have done something right, I guess. Otherwise everyone will vibe their own little React in the codebase.

This comment ignores the key insight of the article. Design is what matters most now. Design is the difference between vibe coding and software engineering.

Given a good design, software engineers today are 100x more productive. What they produce is high quality due to the design. Production is fast and cheap due to the agents.

You are correct, there will be a reckoning for large scale systems which are vibe coded. They author is also correct, well designed systems no longer need frameworks or vendors, and they are unlikely to fail because they were well designed from the start.

>software engineers today are 100x more productive

Somebody needs to explain to my lying eyes where these 100xers are hiding. They seem to live in comments on the internet, but I'm not seeing the teams around me increase their output by two orders of magnitude.

I would say I'm like 1.2x more productive, and I think I'm more of the typical case (of course I read all of the code the LLM produces, so maybe that's where I've gone wrong).

If they did a year of work in ~3 days, presumably they're on a beach somewhere.

This is how you get managers saying

"we have taken latest AI subscription. We expect you to be able to increase productivity and complete 5/10/100 stories per sprint from now on instead of one per sprint that we planned previously".

Citation needed. For both the existence of said people (how do you develop said design sense without a ton of coding experience?) and that they are 100x more productive.

If you produced 1 line of code per hour before "AI" because you suck, and now produce 100 lines of code per hour with AI, you are now a 100x programmer.

I'm joking of course, but that's probably how some people see it.

No I think you're 100% correct. But these people also miss out on the irony that using "lines of code" as a metric is a literal meme amongst software developers.

No they’re not.

The correct meaning has always been 1024 bytes where I’m from. Then I worked with more people like you.

Now, it depends.

The best wolves I know define their own process to find out if the idea is good and ignore all externally imposed processes that get in their way.

This. And the reason this is relevant today is because an excellent build and test system multiplies the effectiveness of coding agents which multiply again the effectiveness of next level engineers.

There aren’t many other things I can think of that have such a huge positive impact on the productivity of an engineering team.

The wolf and Rands are next level.

> Good work does not speak for itself, it needs a shitload of people to speak for it.

Good work does speak for itself. The work speaks directly to other like minded engineers who "get it" and spread the word.

Nobody in authority needs to do any selling or mandating for the kind of work and the kind of person Rands is talking about here.

Have you never seen a good project or idea, that every engineer who saw it thought was awesome, die because it wasn't sold well to authority?

Authority may not have to sell or mandate for that person to get their work done but supporting good ideas and effective people is what authority should be doing.

No I haven’t. I’ve also deliberately avoided the types of places where that happens throughout my entire career.

Those types of ideas and projects have no need for the approval of authority. They are their own authority.

If a person in authority ends such a project or idea then the engineering culture at that organization is so completely broken the best path is to leave.

Understood, I think we are coming from different environments.

Edit: I wish I had access to ones more like yours.

On the other hand the incorrect values may drive architects to think more critically about what their tools are producing.

On the whole, not trusting one's own tools is a regression, not an advancement. The cognitive load it imposes on even the most capable and careful person can lead to all sorts of downstream effects.

The ecosystem. Micro services are the most efficient way to integrate CNCF projects deeply with your platform at any size.

Edit: Genuinely curious about the downvotes here. The concept directly maps to all the reasons the article author cited.

I'm not following. What does CNCF have to do with it?

https://landscape.cncf.io/ are micro services

Hmm. Could you maybe elaborate on why integrating "CNCF projects deeply with your platform at any size" is so desirable?

The French railway service?