The merge wall: scaling productivity breaks merging

Note: Steve and Gene’s talk on Vibe Coding and the post IDE world was one of the top talks of AIE CODE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Dtu2bilcFs&t=1019s&pp=0gcJCU0KAYcqIYzv

From building legendary platforms at Google and Amazon to authoring one of the most influential essays on AI-powered development (Revenge of the Junior Developer, quoted by Dario Amodei himself), Steve Yegge has spent decades at the frontier of software engineering—and now he's leading the charge into what he calls the "factory farming" era of code. After stints at SourceGraph and building Beads (a purely vibe-coded issue tracker with tens of thousands of users), Steve co-authored The Vibe Coding Book and is now building VC (VibeCoder), an agent orchestration dashboard designed to move developers from writing code to managing fleets of AI agents that coordinate, parallelize, and ship features while you sleep.

We sat down with Steve at AI Engineer Summit to dig into why Claude Code, Cursor, and the entire 2024 stack are already obsolete, what it actually takes to trust an agent after 2,000 hours of practice (hint: they will delete your production database if you anthropomorphize them), why the real skill is no longer writing code but orchestrating agents like a NASCAR pit crew, how merging has become the new wall that every 10x-productive team is hitting (and why one company's solution is literally "one engineer per repo"), the rise of multi-agent workflows where agents reserve files, message each other via MCP, and coordinate like a little village, why Steve believes if you're still using an IDE to write code by January 1st, you're a bad engineer, how the 12–15 year experience bracket is the most resistant demographic (and why their identity is tied to obsolete workflows), the hidden chaos inside OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google as they scale at breakneck speed, why rewriting from scratch is now faster than refactoring for a growing class of codebases, and his 2025 prediction: we're moving from subsistence agriculture to John Deere-scale factory farming of code, and the Luddite backlash is only just beginning.

We discuss:

• Why Claude Code, Cursor, and agentic coding tools are already last year's tech—and what comes next: agent orchestration dashboards where you manage fleets, not write lines

• The 2,000-hour rule: why it takes a full year of daily use before you can predict what an LLM will do, and why trust = predictability, not capability

• Steve's hot take: if you're still using an IDE to develop code by January 1st, 2025, you're a bad engineer—because the abstraction layer has moved from models to full-stack agents

• The demographic most resistant to vibe coding: 12–15 years of experience, senior engineers whose identity is tied to the way they work today, and why they're about to become the interns

• Why anthropomorphizing LLMs is the biggest mistake: the "hot hand" fallacy, agent amnesia, and how Steve's agent once locked him out of prod by changing his password to "fix" a problem

• Should kids learn to code? Steve's take: learn to vibe code—understand functions, classes, architecture, and capabilities in a language-neutral way, but skip the syntax

• The 2025 vision: "factory farming of code" where orchestrators run Cloud Code, scrub output, plan-implement-review-test in loops, and unlock programming for non-programmers at scale

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Steve Yegge

• X: https://x.com/steve_yegge

• Substack (Stevie's Tech Talks): https://steve-yegge.medium.com/

• GitHub (VC / VibeCoder): https://github.com/yegge-labs

Where to find Latent Space

• X: https://x.com/latentspacepod

• Substack: https://www.latent.space/

Chapters

• 00:00:00 Introduction: Steve Yegge on Vibe Coding and AI Engineering
• 00:00:59 The Backlash: Who Resists Vibe Coding and Why
• 00:04:26 The 2000 Hour Rule: Building Trust with AI Coding Tools
• 00:03:31 The January 1st Deadline: IDEs Are Becoming Obsolete
• 00:02:55 10X Productivity at OpenAI: The Performance Review Problem
• 00:07:49 The Hot Hand Fallacy: When AI Agents Betray Your Trust
• 00:11:12 Claude Code Isn't It: The Need for Agent Orchestration
• 00:15:20 The Orchestrator Revolution: From Cloud Code to Agent Villages
• 00:18:46 The Merge Wall: The Biggest Unsolved Problem in AI Coding
• 00:26:33 Never Rewrite Your Code - Until Now: Joel Spolsky Was Wrong
• 00:22:43 Factory Farming Code: The John Deere Era of Software
• 00:29:27 Google's Gemini Turnaround and the AI Lab Chaos
• 00:33:20 Should Your Kids Learn to Code? The New Answer
• 00:34:59 Code MCP and the Gossip Rate: Latest Vibe Coding Discoveries