[eongchen]

The 100 hours aren't a vibecoding tax. They're an engineering knowledge tax.

I built 4 AI products to hundreds of thousands of users, working with AI agents as collaborators, not autopilots. The difference isn't the tool. It's whether you can tell the AI is wrong and stop it before it wastes 10 hours going down the wrong path.

The author watched Claude create new S3 buckets for several rounds before catching it. An experienced engineer catches that on the first diff. Most of those 100 hours were spent not knowing you're lost.

"Vibecoding" as a concept is the problem. It implies you can vibe your way through engineering. You can't. AI is a force multiplier, not a replacement for knowing what good looks like.