Why you can't vibe code real software

[00:00:00]infrastructure. That's it. You can end the video right now. It seems like everyone these days is gambling, whether it's on Kick or on Claude. I truly believe there is still an art to writing good code. It's something that clankers just can't replicate. It's a lot like written text. [music] I can smell the AI-generated cadence. I can feel the water draining from my tap as I read it.

[00:00:18]In a similar vein, even sloppy, poorly written human code has a weird charm that I can decipher. [music] You can see the junior dev going through the cycles in their mind. But, for our corporate overlords, if the slop is good enough to run, the slop is good enough to ship.

[00:00:31]Because if you got into software engineering for the love of the game, you'll realize quickly that the game is [music] making stock market graph go up.

[00:00:37]There is one thing you can't slop your way to success, though. Repeat after me.

[00:00:40]You [music] can vibe code a feature, you can't vibe code uptime. A button can be copy-pasted, but the four nines are earned. This is because of a little thing called feedback loops. When you vibe code your way to a UI feature, you'll find out in your local dev environment, or it gets caught within your AI-generated tests, AI-generated code review, AI-generated coworker, AI-generated waifu. However, when that vibe-coded feature lands in production, or worse, you vibe-coded your entire infrastructure just by spamming yes to Claude. Oh boy, your feedback loop is a random 5-hour outage, multiple videos made about your service, an endless swarm of alarm emoji tweets. [music] And because you've spent that time outsourcing your critical thinking, you don't know whether the issue is your code, your SSL certificate expiring, some bonk Terraform, or if you work at Grindr, a network outage caused by the Republican [music] National Convention.

[00:01:23]You can't make no mistakes your way out of a network outage, bro. 2025 is the first full year we submitted to our slop machine overlords. And to absolutely [music] no one's surprise, it was the worst year of all time for outages. Even with access to Claude Diddy Pro [music] Max's fably five and OpenAI's soulless soul, 2026 isn't looking that much better. Literally this month, bikini image generator platform Grok was caught uploading entire Git repos [music] to their cloud, and they didn't do this to be sneaky. The founder of Grok, a legal African immigrant social media personality [music] Elon Musk, is apparently a very smart guy. So, he has much sneakier ways to do telemetry and track your data. This mess was just a really bad infrastructure move from their engineers. I'm sorry, they get paid how much? Sometimes you can do everything right, but dodgy infra from another company can cook you.

[00:02:05]>> [music] >> This happened a few weeks ago to the cloud provider Railway. They depend on or hopefully used to depend on Google's Cloud API to populate their routing tables. To no fault of their own, they just woke up and noticed Google kaboomed their access, resulting in an outage that lasted almost a day. All because Google's system and infrastructure engineers flipped a switch that disabled Railway's access without even an email notification. I wonder though, didn't they get the memo that coding is solved?

[00:02:27][music] It's so solved that Cloud had an outage a month ago and they still haven't put out a postmortem for it.

[00:02:31]>> [music] >> Even big AI bro Karpathy can't believe how hard it is to keep a modern app in check. The permanent upper class is well aware of this, which is why when you go to the careers page of coding is solved.com, you'll find an entire section dedicated [music] to hiring infrastructure engineers. It's the same on truly non-profit negative 13 billion revenue open AI. Infrastructure is one of the last bastions of programming where the larpers get exposed. [music] It isn't easy though. It encompasses a lot of different things. There are lots of excellent resources [music] to learn infra. boot.dev has an excellent devops course, which is free by the way. And before Google went into full slop mode, they actually coined the term SRE all the way back in like 2003. Nowadays, it's more like slop reliability engineering, am I right?

[00:03:09]>> Oh, brother, THIS GUY STINKS.

[00:03:12]>> THEY HAVE an excellent series of free SRE handbooks. I've read this one and I still reference it. But above all of this, if I were to leave you with one piece of advice, try self-hosting.

[00:03:21]Seriously, it's almost idiot-proof. Even the normies are doing it. Go to this GitHub repo, find a project [music] you like, pick up a crusty old MacBook, and find an evening you can spare. That's all you really need. Fundamentally, [music] don't let anyone fool you. We're building slop on top of slop, and the AI chads are trying to convince you otherwise. [music] There is still so much value in being deeply technical, and if you don't take my word for it, just look at who these guys are [music] hiring. Unlike infrastructure though, the one thing you shouldn't have to worry about is enterprise authentication, [music] which brings us to the sponsor of today's video, WorkOS.

[00:03:50]There are many things you could vibe code, [music] but the one thing you shouldn't even consider is authentication. And why would you when WorkOS is around? [music] I mean, let's get started with the basics. Look at this beautiful login box, and it may look familiar to you. [music] You might have seen it on Claude, Cursor, or Vercel. That's because they're powered by WorkOS. And before you ask, but Big Box, if all these big players are using WorkOS, how the heck am I meant to?

[00:04:12]Well, for starters, it's free for the first [music] million users. There you go. What if your users aren't humans?

[00:04:17]And instead, they're clankers operating on behalf of humans. [music] WorkOS has actually partnered up with Cloudflare and Firecrawl to bring AuthMD. Although it looks like a markdown [music] file, it's actually an open standard to let agents sign in to your app. Now, I personally don't know what they're cooking over at WorkOS, but they're making a big push for the goat status. On top of all of this, you get a slick MFA setup. It has audit logs for your compliance and security shenanigans. It has some of the best fine-grained role-based access control I've ever seen. [music] It has radar to protect you from bots and fraud, and a whole other bunch of products that you have to check out by heading on over to bigboxsuite.dev/workos.