The age of fast food

2 May 2026

An analogy came to my mind this winter: vibecoding is fast food. You can cook at home (write the code yourself), you can go to a good restaurant (hire a programmer), or you can buy yourself a hamburger (use AI tools).

AI works in the short term, but in the long term, it's as unsustainable and unhealthy as eating fast food for every meal. It can quickly generate a lot of code that nobody fully understands. As an extreme example: Gregory Terzian, a Servo developer, called the web browser generated by Cursor's AI agents "a uniquely bad design that could never support anything resembling a real-world web engine".

There certainly are many options that lie between using an AI agent to build a whole product and using no AI at all. Just like restaurants that order ready-to-cook chicken breasts instead of buying whole birds with heads and feet intact, you can carefully use AI for boring tasks. In many real projects, there are one-shot scripts, long configuration files, boilerplate, prototypes, or bureaucratic reports. If you can avoid or abstract out these tasks, it's wonderful, but sometimes you just can't, either for legal reasons or because of corporate bureaucracy. AI is fine for these tasks.

However, please treat AI output as a disposable, low-quality attempt, not like a piece of wisdom sent to you from heaven:

• Please don't paste LLM output in conversations. If I ask you about something, then I consider you smarter than an LLM, which I could have asked myself.
• Don't assume that AI could quickly improve code that somebody else planned and built for several months. Again, it suggests that AI is smarter than the person, which is insulting to them.
• Don't send for review a huge AI-generated pull request without a clear aim. AI agents tend to do more than you asked for, so they start to "correct" the code and often introduce subtle errors in the process. Prefer a focused, controlled change that is easier to review.
• Use AI for code review, but note that it cannot replace a human reviewer. AI is great at finding errors that a human easily misses (such as typos, inconsistent naming, or coding standard violations). In contrast, a human reviewer understands the context and business logic, which AI cannot do. Many AI-generated suggestions are incorrect or excessive.
• Please know that you can always run the same prompt again with different results, try a different LLM, search the Web, or even consult a book. Don't trust LLMs blindly, especially for factual information. Hallucinations are still a problem.

Unfortunately, the world in general is not getting smarter in recent years. The overuse of AI fits into this trend. We now have AI-generated music and AI-generated books that were predicted by George Orwell in his novel "1984". When I first read about AI agents, I couldn't help but remember an old Helloween's song:

Sometimes, when he's feeling bored, he's calling it a day
He's got his computers and they do it their own way

Do we live in a dystopia now? Yes and no. It was possible to build a whole software product cheaply before; it was called outsourcing twenty years ago. For the $20'000 that Anthropic spent on vibecoding a C compiler, they could have hired somebody in a very poor country, which would end up with a similar result, just not so fast.

Great software still takes time, effort, and consideration. It's possible that the AI mania will make us value artisanal things more. If everything could be generated, then what is left to us is our ingenuity.

Just like my previous blog post on the subject, this one was written without any help from LLMs. I'll continue to "cook" delicious software for you.

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