I wonder what your take is on the current landscape --- do you see this approach still having an edge? If you wanted to outcompete for a current-day SaaS app, do you see an undervalued approach that would still confer an advantage?
I absolutely still believe in small teams of highly-effective and aligned people. And they should be working smarter, and thinking forward and more holistically, than anything LLM-ish based generation and reasoning can do.
Let's say, 5 years ago, you already had vibe coding. It wasn't implemented atop LLMs, but by VCs giving you full-time use of a thousand junior software engineers and product designers, from a country of very energetic and educated people, but with much lower cost of living.
(Not offshoring in general, but a particular thousand-juniors kind, for the analogy.)
Your team of founders spends all their time prompting the thousand-juniors to do things. The thousand-juniors work very rapidly, but they only do what you tell them to do. And they tend to copy heavily, but with a little obfuscation. They don't think holistically. They always speak confidently, regardless of how little they understand. Because of how they were taught to knock off tasks, they never have an original thought, or don't voice or act on it if they did. They're just trying to knock off sprint tasks by technically doing what you told them. There is also a lot of bloat like a thousand juniors pasting together 'solutions' they looked up on Stackoverflow, which make little sense (e.g., pulled in a whole new framework to do one thing, rather than do it with the existing framework). This is how they were trained.
With your founding team trying to herd this thousand-juniors army of Jira ticket closers, they will churn huge amounts of code, and the appearance of functionality, very rapidly. No one will have occasion for much insight into anything.
That just might work, if it was ZIRP, and you are just putting up a Potemkin Village to get enterprise sales and more investment, until an exit. But is a terrible way to get PMF, innovation, or anything sustainable.
That said...
One way that this vibe coding competes with, say, a stereotypical "10x" Lisp hacker, is when you're a "business" cofounder, and you talk over a new idea with the hacker cofounder, who then worked through it all weekend, and shows you a PoC on Monday. You don't understand the subtleties of what the hacker did, but you're impressed that they could deliver "functionality" so quickly.
But today, your thousand-juniors can also deliver this "functionality" over the weekend. You can't (initially) tell that they just mechanically interpreted the task they were given, without original thought. And they maybe they even started by cloning and obfuscating two similar-sounding bases of GPL code.
But to you, the business person, the effect looks the same as the hacker who thought about it and used skill. And you might not be able to tell, for months, that the thousand-juniors collective result just isn't very bright, nor sustainable. (Not to mention that sometimes they veer a little too close to plagiarism or IP theft in how they work, and you don't know when you're gambling on whether they'll/you'll be caught.)
But the existence of this thousand-juniors rapid turnaround of "functionality", and you not being able to tell the difference between smart product engineering and slop, means that you never even try to build a more effective team, nor go through the experiences that help you become one.
