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Hello there,
This past week I had the opportunity to do a deep dive in to a completely vibe-coded application. Note that I didn't build it. My main task was to audit it to see if it was production ready or if there were any notable issues with the codebase.
Well. It's been a few days, and I have my thoughts. But first, let me say that this is a great opportunity to see if indeed software developer jobs are about to be wiped out by sentient emotionless agents.
Because that's been the claim for some time now. In 2025, Mark Zuckerberg stated that he believed that AI will be doing the work of mid-level engineers by the end of the year.
And I think he got it right. But the part that the media and news outlets missed, was that this most likely depends on human engineers driving the entire thing.
If you put a completely non-technical person in the captains chair, you are no doubt going to get an unfinished product.
Now let's talk about the app for a second.
The application itself is pretty complex, from a human developer perspective. It's intended to be a go-to-market AI agent that users can communicate with through Slack or some other entry-way.
It scans emails, creates files, analyzes metrics and even does automated outreach. At the end of the day, "go to market" essentially boils down to finding the ideal ICP's and doing outreach for your product.
The agent itself is the complicated component here. Each agent is an OpenClaw instance running in its own cloud environment with various configs tailored to a specific client.
Nothing Earth-shattering, but definitely a bit more than just a quick weekend build.
You need to worry about performance, security, agent memory management, and API integrations. Not including the core "web" elements, like authentication, email templates, billing and invoicing, SEO and several other dozen things.
The original developer in this case, is business-savvy and knows startups. But they aren't technical. They don't know what Postgres is and frankly, they don't want to know.
They just want to talk to their coding agent with in-plain-English specs, and get the desired output.
Which makes total sense, since that's what all the frontier models have been promising for some time now.
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