How is this different than testing an idea with a janky, rushed, handcoded protype or MVP? That's how a lot of product development has always been done.

Well there’s at least two reasons people might not buy your cake: they don’t want cake, or the cake is bad.

For the first group, it doesn’t matter how good your cake is. If you spend a year perfecting it, you won’t sell them any more cakes. And for many products, this group is basically 100% of customers.

I agree. You shouldn't test an idea with a vibecoded shitty app. That doesn't mean you shouldn't test it with an LLM-generated, refined, well-tested (by human users) app. I don't think it's a boolean. I think it's a continuum.

Those companies, and those people within otherwise decent companies, have existed since long before the advent of LLMs. Avoiding their influence is a career skill as important as the code itself. And I'm not saying you can just avoid them for your whole career, they're everywhere and are being supercharged by LLMs.

It's disappointing that the prevailing sentiment now is that architecture is less important than we thought. Software is always going to be getting more important, and all of it should be well thought out. If these people had these tools in 2004 they might've made thousands of fragmented buggy social media startups and actually slowed progress on that front.