Stan Girard’s lifecycle of modern software — there’s some truth to it:
- Day 1: Vibe code with Claude
- Week 1: Fix bugs for production
- Month 1: Senior engineer optimizes for scale
- Year 1: Rewrite in Rust
The punchline: despite using AI extensively, most of the code that goes to production is still human-written. Domain expertise matters. Doing one thing well requires understanding that thing deeply — and that’s not something you can vibe-code your way through.
The counter-argument worth remembering: if software survives a year, that’s signal. It proved market demand. The rewrite isn’t failure — it’s the expected progression from prototype to production.
Originally posted on LinkedIn