80% of the weirdness in AI today (UIs for a hundred claude codes at once, Opus fast mode at $220/M toks) is easy to explain with the Occam's reason:
It's addictive.
This is the primary reason we as an industry are building orchestrators for our orchestrators, compulsively building apps from scratch that we don't really use.
I've made almost fifty vibe-coded projects for myself this past year. How many do I use today that are older than 2 months? None. Almost all of them didn't survive the 'this-is-new' phase.
Two exceptions:
1. the proof-of-concepts (or is it proofs of concept) that helped experimentation, prove out new tech and agentic patterns for Southbridge, or help me make a change in behavior that only needed short-term work.
2. things that were agentically built but without really 'vibing' - with maintenance, reliability and repeated use in mind. The actual lift in how much you can build with AI here I'd put around 50% for a senior engineer. Review load and catching hallucinations still take up a lot of the time you save.
hankweave for example (github.com/hankweave-runtime) was built by models, but with tons of human review and thought. Models made it easier for us to think through race conditions, implications when different systems interact, and iteratively fix specific, hard-to-reproduce bugs.
But was it more fun than building without AI? Debatable.
The longer I build with AI the clearer it seems that the addictive way doesn't lead to systems of value that we can build on top of - which implies a fork in the road somewhere that's fast approaching.
Will be interesting to see - open to thoughts!
x.com/garrytan/status/2020346258410598574?s=20
Quentin and Garry's posts (blog.quent.in/blog/2026/03/09/one-more-prompt-the-dopamine-trap-of-agentic-coding/) are what provoked this - as well as personal experiences
Hrishi Olickel
@hrishioa
Building artificially intelligent bridges at Southbridge, prev-CTO Greywing (YC W21). Chop wood carry water.