[falcor84]

> Writing production code is a completely different game than (vibe) coding a prototype. To get this right, you need profound knowledge of the programming language, of its ecosystem, of the dos and don’ts of good software design and development, of the additional bolts and screws needed to make the software production-ready, and much more.

Having spent some of my career as an SRE, I would argue that what distinguishes production code from it-worked-on-my-machine code has very little to do with the things at the start of that list and almost everything with the "bolts and screws needed to make the software production-ready", and particularly the 12 factors [0]. With my anecdata, I've had a much more productive time maintaining in production systems written by junior coders who only started using that particular language a few months ago, but are eager to take direction, than experienced developers with profound knowledge and strong opinions held tightly.

With this in mind, I've been quite productive doing "vibe engineering" [1], rigidly controlling the code from the outside as mostly a black box, with extensive precommit testing, focusing my code reviews on preventing weird "going off the rails" issues and adding new tests against them, while not worrying at all about code style.

[0] https://12factor.net/

[1] https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/7/vibe-engineering/