It wasn't one-shotted of course but I don't think there's much difference in the outcome between one-shot and like 100-shot over a week. That company is still doomed.
Think of something like Trello. Who is going to pay for that when you can easily vibe code something superior (yes you really can now).
I'm kind of surprised nobody has done that yet actually. I guess Opus 5.5 has only been out for a very short time...
It wouldn't be for free though, would it? People need to build and maintain it (and there's LLM cost associated with it too).
Let's say you are a 5 person start-up. It makes much more sense to pay $15/user/month for services like Jira, Slack, Email etc. then to build and maintain everything yourself.
For super large companies, it might make financial sense to build some of the tools in-house. But then again, that probably already made sense for LLMs were a thing. But there is more to it than just the pure financials (i.e. salary).
Maybe a 5 person company wouldn't do it. A 100 person one though? No brainer. And it only takes one to open source their solution.
Slop curators and tech support shoulders to cry on. Could be lucrative.
There are plenty of use cases for the ability to quickly through together and refine an application without reviewing the code though.
1. a puzzle game with complex interplay, pieces to place, design vs. play mode, storing multiple solutions with the puzzle, and more. I've since iterated something like 200 times as I worked out the design etc., but the first iteration was 99% correct and what I asked for
2. a learn-to-read application with built-in stories (that the LLM wrote) the ability to import epub, text, and HTML, that uses the built-in speech libraries as a default, but also supports an open-source TTS library that I gave in the first prompt, tracks progress and problem workds, has multiple games to reinforce learning, and has a parental mode for tracking progress and configuring the tool overall.
Frankly I was stunned that Claude one-shotted that second app, there was a lot in the prompt, and it did it all. I fully expected to have to iterate on the first draft multiple times. But it worked out of the box.
With earlier models that doesn't really work. You really have to read the code and watch it like a hawk or it will make a big mess.
To put it another way, with lesser models you have to guide them at a code level. With Opus 5.5 you only have to guide it at an architectural / feature level.
I am not disputing that the models are getting better for vibe coding. But I think people have very different standards of what a 'big mess' or 'maintainable software' is.
"People said it before and it wasn't true then" isn't really an argument about it being true now. There are plenty of things that happened where the zealots jumped the gun with the hype. Bitcoin for example. "People said bitcoin was going to succeed in 2005, 2006, 2007...". Or even the web. It was mega hyped in the dot com boom and then crashed and of course loaaads of stupid people thought that was the end of it.
the moment there is a model which can code whole app, we can fairly say software engineering is done.