I've seen at least one decent use case from "normies" around me: Bypassing stupid company processes to achieve actual automated productivity in your rote processes instead of the theatre of it.
Sounds like a contrived situation, but there's a surprising amount of "thought leader" CEOs out there who make completely nonsensical decisions under the banner of "saving costs and automating things".
(Real-world example I know of) company pays for cheapest tier they can find of Gemini, tell everyone to use it. But won't pay for Asana seats, so every user in your 100-person startup is a guest, and can't use the connector in any AI app to TRULY do useful task management with AI.
Having some better access to AI in the browser would pave over that pain for someone who currently doesn't want to spend their own money on something like Claude for Cowork and the Chrome extension to drive the browser, or open a terminal to have Claude Code do it.
My 2c: there is a divide, unacknowledged, between developers that care about "code correctness" (or any other quality/science/whatever adjective you like) and those who care about the whole system they are creating.
I care about making stuff. "Making stuff" means stuff that I can use. I care about code quality yes, but not to an obsessive degree of "I hate my framework's ORM because of <obscure reason nobody cares about>". So, vibe coding is great, because I know enough to guide the agent away from issues or describe how I want the code to look or be changed.
This gets me to my desired effect of "making stuff" much faster, which is why I like it.
My other 2c: There are Engineers who are concerned by the long-term consequences of their work e.g. maintainability.
In real engineering disciplines, the Engineer is accountable for their work. If a bridge you signed off collapses, you're accountable and if it turns out you were negligent you'll face jail time. In Software, that might be a program in a car.
The Engineering mindset embodies these principles regardless of regulatory constraints. The Engineer needs to keep in mind those who'll be using their constructions. With Agentic Vibecoding, I can never get confident that the resulting software will behave according to specs. I'm worried that it'll scewover the user, the client, and all stakeholders. I can't accept half-assed work just because it saved me 2 days of typing.
I don't make stuff just for the sake of making stuff otherwise it would just be a hobby, and in my hobbies I don't need to care about anything, but I can't in good conscience push shit and slop down other people's throats.
The industry cares about reasonable results not perfection.
If vibe coding delivers in one day, + an additional 2 days to solve stupid bugs, what you deliver with utter perfection in 3 months, then the industry doesn't give a shit about slop.
Is it maintainable? Well it's AI that's going to maintain it.
I think the future will turn into one where source code is like assembly code. Do you care about how your automated compiler system is spitting out assembly? Is the assembly code, neat and organized and maintainable? No. You don't care about assembly code. The industry is shifting in the direction where they don't care about ALL source code.
> Is it maintainable? Well it's AI that's going to maintain it.
That's what's currently not possible, it might work in a small webapp or similar.
But in a large system, it absolutely falls apart when having to maintain it.
Sure, it can fix a bug, but it doesn't understand the side effects it creates with the fix, yet.
Maybe in the future that will also be possible. I do agree with you about business/management not caring about long term impacts if short term gains are possible.
I know in some car tuning circles, or even just blue collar Joes in some places, will recommend removing the catalytic converter. Supposedly it makes the car use less fuel at the cost of worse emissions, and can make it sound better for those who care about that.
Time/energy wise, even with agentic coding, that's probably not the most fun value proposition for smaller/solo dev teams. I now have to maintain a mental model of several versions of my software, track features, refactors, etc across all the supported versions, and make sure my work doesn't overlap too much lest I cause more bugs while keeping everything stable.
I wouldn't charge customers _less_ for that just because it's now a one-time payment.
Agreed, I do get the feeling there's a lot more underlying the author's problems than "just" extreme burnout at a deskjob. Software has been a relatively high leverage career path in the last decade; surely there were other paths he could have taken before hitting an absolute wall.
As other commenters have pointed out, this does seem like going from one extreme to another - especially once religion gets involved.
I wish Dylan well, though I do hope some deeper, more moderate self reflection takes place at some point.
Sure, waste a decade or two and then live your real life.
FIRE is a nice idea, but in the pure sense it is really just the idea of deferring the life you really want to live. You might die before you get there.
The fisherman and businessman story come to mind here.
1. The life I want to live doesn't involve optimising for a salary. I want to fish for fun. Not fish for a living.
2. High earning SV engineers can easily build a substantial corpus in under 10 years.
3. Most people don't know what they want to do. That means experimenting till you find it.
4. Its the safest way of figuring out and following your dreams I can think of. Of course you may die before 30 but thats statistically less probable. I am optimising for the case where I do live to the median age. Optimising for the worse case scenario seems too pessimistic.
Emigrating halfway across the world is not cheap in the first place.
Greece is also not cheap for where it stands on the economic level compared to the average income, especially back in 2018 when Dylan did it, and especially for property even outside of urban areas. Euboea is not super remote either, it's about an hour or two's drive from Athens depending where you go.
So sure, the farm might not make money, but I would wager he had a good amount saved up between him and his family to make the transition possible.
Sounds like a contrived situation, but there's a surprising amount of "thought leader" CEOs out there who make completely nonsensical decisions under the banner of "saving costs and automating things".
(Real-world example I know of) company pays for cheapest tier they can find of Gemini, tell everyone to use it. But won't pay for Asana seats, so every user in your 100-person startup is a guest, and can't use the connector in any AI app to TRULY do useful task management with AI.
Having some better access to AI in the browser would pave over that pain for someone who currently doesn't want to spend their own money on something like Claude for Cowork and the Chrome extension to drive the browser, or open a terminal to have Claude Code do it.
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