Agentic coding is amazing at getting you 90% of the way to "finished", but getting products to feel really polished seems to take monumental effort if you're just "vibing".
Yet engineers working on world-class products have ample access to plenty of frontier LLM tokens. Products like Linear, Instagram, Google Docs, Figma, etc. This class of products were super polished before LLMs took over, and they've stayed polished in the post-LLM era.
My question: What's different about how those products are built/maintained that keeps them feeling polished?
Compare with so many vibe-coded apps we've all seen, which almost universally feel like they're missing that polish that makes them feel professional.
For example:
- Are these organizations simply moving slower? (As they're already incumbent in the space.)
- Is visual design, copy editing, etc. still being done by (gasp) humans?
Would love to hear any first- or second-hand accounts!
Agentic coding is amazing at getting you 90% of the way to "finished", but getting products to feel really polished seems to take monumental effort if you're just "vibing".
Yet engineers working on world-class products have ample access to plenty of frontier LLM tokens. Products like Linear, Instagram, Google Docs, Figma, etc. This class of products were super polished before LLMs took over, and they've stayed polished in the post-LLM era.
My question: What's different about how those products are built/maintained that keeps them feeling polished?
Compare with so many vibe-coded apps we've all seen, which almost universally feel like they're missing that polish that makes them feel professional.
For example:
- Are these organizations simply moving slower? (As they're already incumbent in the space.)
- Is visual design, copy editing, etc. still being done by (gasp) humans?
Would love to hear any first- or second-hand accounts!
Slower iterations and human oversight likely contribute.