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by meetingthrower 22 days ago
That's a great way to put it: functional slop. That's what I mean tho - as long as it is minimally functional it does its job.

I totally get the shade thrown at ycombinator. But I guess my perception is that it has never been about the tech for them and more about getting quick hacks to get to market quickly. So it feels on brand?

2 comments

You're right it's a fine line, but I think there was always a kind of underlying 'tech legitimacy'. PG is a big Lisp nerd. HN is ultra minimal and well designed.

It's one thing to say 'just make it work' - it's another to create hype on top of nonsense.

I don't want to diss vibecoding - because it has it's place, but GStack is being presented in the context of something new and amazing in terms of engineering productivity - not just 'a thing that works good enough'.

But there's an on-brand element to it.

It's a bridge to far though.

There is already backlash, whereas, I'm not sure there is backlash to AirBnB's initial attempts - literally nobody is going to care what their stack is.

> functional slop

I suppose the question is: will customers and business people care?

At the end of the day, if the system does what it needs to do to in exchange for money, then it's a success if people's eyes. Heck, even basic security and privacy features get ignored in most systems.

Average person treats their computers like any other appliance, they don't care if the app takes 10 minutes to load, or is slow, or ad ridden, they just want it to work.

Engineers obsess about code quality as an artistic expression but the reality is that executives and investors won't care. You can scream "maintenance burden!" all you want, but investors will happily throw money at the problem down the line to make it go away.

Our industry simply doesn't have any required rigor outside of a few edge cases in heavily regulated industries.