This was the first year FurSquared used Zebra printers for registration — specifically the ZD420C model. Previously, going back to before I started to staff, FurSquared used the HID DTC1250e printer for on demand full-color badges. At my direction, the convention pivoted away from these printers and the results met my expectations.
Why not give the same ticket or weekend pass to everyone?
Most furries want to be represented and addressable while sticking to their custom online identity. One of my identities is “Cendyne”, another would be the name on my paychecks. The name “Cendyne” isn’t a username or some gamer tag. It represents both me and my character.
The face I wear to the grocery store is no where to be seen on this site. People know me by that name in this community. I, like many, wear art of my character at conventions.
Not everyone can afford art. Customized badges give every an attendee the chance to identify one another regardless of their ability to afford and carry identifying artwork.
Furry conventions care deeply about the safety of their attendees too. If a troublemaker needs to be removed from the convention, with the coordination of the venue, a unique event-specific badge affords a lot more opportunity to track down a person than a here-say description.
Apart from exceptions like Las Vegas Fur Con, which is 21+ only, furry conventions offer spaces for all audiences. Badges for minors must be visually distinct from adults so they can be identified at a distance and kept away from adult spaces.
After the convention, the badge also functions as memorabilia. At the new year, many will wear last year's badges to show their friends that this convention is worth returning to.
Badges are customized unique trophies that should survive for years after the event is over. They need to be bright, memorable, and legible.
FurSquared had been using HID DTC1250e card printers for years now. At the time, it satisfied these needs. CR-80 cards are durable, cheap, and a blank canvas for any artwork we could come up with.
A canvas needs color, though. The ribbons to do full color, black, and lamination are around 21 cents per card. At scale, this is a reasonable $0.30 per badge.
Besides taking around 40 seconds to print each badge, each year, at least one printer would stop working entirely or otherwise be too problematic to leave in operation during the event. We had to expense between $1400 (used) and $2500 per printer per year. This alone breaks the economic savings of the media costs to produce these badges.
| Also... the drivers were so bad that I had to intentionally shut down and re-initialize CUPS every time a printer turned on, turned off, ran out of materials, or some other unforeseen problem. |
| Every 250 prints, a printer needs a new ribbon cartridge! Every time a stack of 100 CR-80 cards ran out, the printer would stall. Automating CUPS restarts took weekends of my life away and I burned through about $100 in materials just so I could leave the registration room for even normal reload operations. |
Other conventions, like AnthroExpo use Zebra ID Card printers like the ZC100, which prints single sided full color in 24 seconds. That does beat the Fargo HID DTC1250e printing speed.
The price of switching over or maintaining two different printer models and supplies was too great to justify, however.
Alternatively, you can buy even faster printers like Motor City Fur Con with the ZXP Series 7 line up. MCFC reports a full color print in twelve seconds and with three printers they're able to process this year's 2525 attendees with ease.
The price goes up a thousand per unit though. Going fast reliably costs 💰💰💰. At twelve seconds per print, these printers can serve a sizable convention!
All this time we've been focused on making something bright, memorable, and durable inside the printer. What if the printer did less? In 2-6 seconds, we could print a single black and white layer on a card printer. This is what Midwest FurFest does!
The downside and constraint is that every badge is the same, you cannot differentiate the content on the card if you're only printing a black and white layer.
| Nah uh. I could totally put the right card in before it prints! |
| No way. You're not going to add more skin-oil, dust, and stray fur-suit fluff into the printer. That's how we lose $3000 a year. |
Sorry, I lied. There's only black. I can't print white, I can't print grey. Any white outlines or other elements (like QR codes) that require contrast must be accommodated in the design.
If we adopt a strategy of printing only black on the same design for everyone (even minors), we get incredible speed without any cost savings. In fact, pre-printing all the cards (at $0.50 / each through a supplier) will raise the unit price of each badge.
So how do we save money and have some flexibility for the badge designs?
I don't recall if a Aquatifur was the first convention I went to that used labelers. The one that I know for sure at my first attendance was Biggest Little Fur Con (BLFC).
Back then, before any of this mattered to me, they used a desktop PT-P700 label printer. For a convention under 300 people, this is a great choice to start your convention with if you have no technical know-how.
| Any and every badge design is within reach now. As long as it works well with a black-only print area. |
You should not print flyers at Staples for event badges. They'll rip off the lanyards and spoil from an uncomfortably moist fur-suit hug. Instead, find a plastic printer that offers event badge printing.
At BLFC, attendees can pick their own badge art ahead of time. When they arrive, staff see their preference and grab the appropriate plastic badge. Unlike BLFC, FurSquared binds the label to a badge design specific to the attendee's purchase, whether general admission, a daily pass, or a super sponsor.
| How I have several blank BLFC badges with different designs is left as an exercise to the reader. I've never been staff of BLFC. |
Above, I mentioned that the PT-P700 is an adequate printer for new conventions under 300 people. BLFC wasn't a small convention in 2018. With 5435 attendees, they made so many people wait on these darn Brother printers.
| The same printing tech is inside my P-Touch D610BT and the timing I measured in print and application depresses me. |
I measure around 6.9 seconds of print time for 3 inches of useful label area, followed by 27.9 seconds of trimming, peeling, and applying a label. Worse if there were a minor — in which case the cart would have to be swapped to another color — add another 60 seconds of execution time to set, print, and reset the printer for the next attendee.
Looking for an alternative? Several conventions roll with Dymo printers, such as the Dymo LabelWriter 550 which works with RegFox, ConCat, and any convention software that supports the native print dialog.
Unfortunately, that price tag comes with a deferred consumable cost... Dymo puts DRM in their labels! You cannot get third party labels for a Dymo printer unless you hack it with additional hardware.
There's actually a comparable option, assuming you don't grab the latest and greatest brand new from Zebra.
Check out listings on eBay. Most are clean and just work. Some might need part replacements like a platen roller, though the reliability and willingness to accept any and all media cannot be understated. These work. These work so well that you'll wonder why Zebra isn't the first recommendation.
| You wouldn't be reading this if all you wanted was "some person on the internet's opinion." I'm laying out the facts that you can make make a logical decision. |
Get a Zebra printer. Just not the "ZSB" (Small Business) series. Those have DRM labels too and everyone hates them. No one wants DRM labels. No one wants print software that breaks if your internet connection drops or your computer goes to sleep. Do not get a ZSB Series Printer. (I have one. Don't.)
| The contracting team that wrote the ZSB software should be professionally erased from this planet. They have done a disservice to the hardware team that made an otherwise functional (but evil) printer. |
| Their release process is in shambles. It's built on someone's personal computer instead of CI. For a company releasing at this scale, this terrifies me. Use ghidra to inspect the ZSB software to see what I mean. |
Back in 2019, FurSquared had a few laptops hooked up to the DTC1250e printers. The check in flow at the time had staff submit a form to render a the badge as a PNG with Pillow with a PNG or JPEG of the artwork with the name on top. Then they'd use the native print dialog to send it to the printer connected over USB.
The very same flow that BLFC used in 2018 (my first time in Reno!) and beyond until... 2023!
| Squeak! |
Nican first deployed ConCat BLFC 2018. Years later, Cellivar contributed Zebra printer to ConCat in 2023. According to the kangaroo rat, BLFC trialed four laptops running with his zebra printers over WebUSB while the old Brother printer setup had ten laptops.
Guess which setup ate through the lines? Cellivar's! On top of that, guess which one didn't get delayed by driver troubleshooting and setup? Also Cellivar's. Where's the difference? Three key details: Zebra Printers, WebUSB, and no native print dialog.
| You keep mentioning the “native print dialog” like it’s a problem |
| It is a problem! The native print dialog slows everything down and adds room for operator error! It's part of why printing full color cards took 90 seconds instead of 40 seconds at FurSquared before I came in. |
| If this chart doesn't cause you to recoil at what you've been missing, I don't know what to tell you. Oh wait — |
| Cellivar isn't the only one to thank for bringing Zebra label printers to furry conventions. Sqekr Tech was formed by several folks out west as a non-profit to lease event registration equipment to other non-profits. If you use ConCat, coordinate with Sqekr Tech. |
Here's why the native print dialog is so harmful: room for error, human fatigue, and timing variance. Staff will choose the same printer and set the same document width, height, and orientation every time. Some staff will rapidly get used to the mechanical process of clicking the same 8 things in sequence – most won't. This must be automated for scale.
There are two ways to remove the native print dialog. Either make the server do it behind the scenes, or directly interface with the printer.
The first thing I did for FurSquared in late 2022 was decouple the printer from the computer. In Process Engineering at a Furry Convention, I designed it to print immediately upon payment. This would only be possible if done through the server. Secondly, since the printers were decoupled from the registration stations, giving the option to select which printer was irrelevant and was not included. In fact, the only time someone intentionally clicked the print button was after updating the badge content and issuing a reprint.
| The aged-like-milk Linux CUPS drivers still caused me so much pain. |
Before that, FurSquared used the native print dialog and had to switch away from 8.5x11 every time. Other conventions like Further Confusion managed to hack in printing into RegFox through chrome extension "integrations" and unsupported chrome flags to bypass the native print dialog.
Midwest FurFest (MFF) made this change after the Covid pandemic. Compared to the prior flow where it would print somewhere and Mario or Luigi (Staff that cosplayed as them) among many others would call out badge names once printed, the process became far more consistent as an attendee.
| Coupled with the proactive tiered queue management, the lines are far faster now than they were years ago. Registration there has really stepped up at MFF. |
Sparkx:
Say what you will about MFF in other areas like room lotto, food choices, location etc, but MFF has got their shit DOWN when it comes to registration.
That wss perhaps the fastest I've ever gotten through a registration line.
#MFF
#MFF2025 source
| Swag, on the other hand, still needs a lot of work. It's another department and my current understanding is they contract out the shirt distribution. A 90 minute line to get a shirt isn't acceptable. Someone would occasionally mention they can be picked up at con store later — which I did — though proactive (actually deny people from queuing) load shedding ought to be implemented next if they can't get enough people to distribute shirts at the rate demanded. |
Once the station at MFF is configured to use the physically adjacent printer, then staff only need to click "Print" wrap up the process. No printer selection, no media configuration, no physical media swapping — only a button press away from helping the next person in line.
The move to Zebra printers at FurSquared went similarly. Each pair of stations had its own primary printer, and in the uncommon case a minor needed to get a badge, printing would route to the appropriate printer through the server.
It's all ice cream and lollipops – until the print server goes down.
| In MFF's case, I heard it was a bad stick of RAM that failed DURING the convention. In my case, it was probably a network fault or a state machine bug. At my remote instruction, they power cycled the server and everything came back online. |
Sirius:
Spy sappin' my print server! #MFF #MFF2024source
| There are a few more downsides. I'll get to that in a moment. |
Another option is to interface directly without involving a windows, Mac, ChromeOS, or otherwise provided native print driver. The application, or in this case, web application, has access somehow to the physical device that will produce the print. There's no CUPS, only your software and WebSerial or WebUSB, or native equivalents that interface with the other side.
This is how Cellivar prints to Zebra printers with ConCat. The badge bitmap is rendered and sent to the printer client-side without any round trips from the server. With a point to point setup like this, there's less technically that can go wrong and any troubleshooting is straight forward.
The cost is that each station necessarily needs its own printer. I don't have the budget for that. This cost is offset by the rental services Sqekr Tech offers. We only use these printers once a year. Other cons can use Sqekr Tech's printers many times a year.
Cellivar can ship out a crate with laptops, printers, and cash boxes without having to setup, train, and be on-call to staff on site. I do. A print server is more complicated than a laptop with WiFi access and a USB cable.
| In gathering my |
| Furry cons have a history of sharing equipment to reduce costs. My team takes that to the next level, keeping the event's costs consistent and putting the proceeds directly back into maintenance, equipment upgrades, and expanding the types of problems we can solve. We've worked with 7 different events, not all of them furry cons! |
| Freight mailing costs are higher than our equipment rental costs. We're still figuring out how to work with far-flung events away from the San Francisco Bay region. I have to settle for sharing notes with Cendyne, not printers. |
Moving solely to direct WebUSB printing does cut off one important benefit: any station in my setup could also check in minors without that printer being connected to the same machine.
A hybrid approach is possible! Just that, once you pay the complexity price of one printer, you've paid it for nearly all printers.
Without a technology R&D team (or load bearing person), your options to speed up the registration lines at your event are limited. If you're out west and use ConCat, hit up Squekr Tech. Otherwise, if you're using ConCat, you might get by with a few zebra printers, as long as they were made in the last 10 years and start with ZD.
| There's a lot more that goes into selecting a specific printer. Maybe I'll write about it some time. Look at eBay for them. Even if discontinued, the printers will work for years to come. Test, verify, practice, and train. |
Should your tech team want to add Zebra support to another registration system, check out Cellivar's WebZLP, that's what powers the ConCat integration.
Otherwise, you seriously need someone with expertise and persistence to research, develop, and integrate a solution that works with your event. It needs to work for thousands of people without the mechanic being on standby the whole time.
After the first two opening hours, registration's line queued no longer than ten people the rest of the convention. Zebra Printers work. Two thousand seven hundred and ninety-five people got badges printed with my software. The only stress I felt from registration were from the four hours before it opened.
| What went wrong? |
The Lenovo T420 Thinkpad from 2011 did not have the SIMD instructions that the Bun.js runtime needs. My software could not start on the hardware I allocated for the task.
You read that right. The software I had could not run on the print server. I had to bring out my personal hardware as a backup for the convention to open on time – which it did!
The free wifi available at the convention center provided around 150Kbps. I was unable to download Bun.js and Tailscale over that network to even begin calibrating the printers. I had to expedite the deployment of our LTE network to even begin the software install.
Thankfully, as the Technology director I had team members scheduled to help during set up and they were available to help even as I reprioritized what would happen and when.
Once the print server was online, we began the calibration process. This was going fine until I discovered a race condition that broke the state machine in the print server.
If the print server accepted a print job when the printer was connected, but the printer disconnects (TCP keep alive) before the PNG is rendered for the badge, the printer would never get reconnected.
Then, upon reinstalling the new update with the fix, the reinstall wiped all the local calibration information, leaving the print server in a state where it would say the printers are online and then never send print jobs to the printers.
Thirty minutes before registration opened, I had to recalibrate all the printers. Unfortunately, the text got partially cut off the bottom for dealer names and registration levels. I strive for perfection, but at that point I had to let go so the doors could open on time.
The take away for anyone else who wants to do a print-server setup, be prepared to replicate the production environment with four or more printers and have several people concurrently (and randomly) print material through the system for over several hours before you can call it safe for go-live.
"},{"id":"https://cendyne.dev/posts/2025-11-26-a-vibe-coded-saas-killed-my-team.html","url":"https://cendyne.dev/posts/2025-11-26-a-vibe-coded-saas-killed-my-team.html","title":"A Vibe Coded SaaS Killed My Team","summary":"We lost the capitalism game and they're trying to get a second wind through a broken vibe-coded SaaS platform.","date_published":"2025-11-26T16:00:00.000Z","date_modified":"2025-11-26T16:16:55.201Z","banner_image":"https://c.cdyn.dev/GMdXzX3w","content_html":"I considered it a possibility. Now it's set in stone. Instead of fully shutting down in the coming year due to tumbling revenue, leadership decided "What if we use someone else's platform?" It just so happens, the platform they chose is vibe coded.
Like many tech companies during the pandemic, we over-hired and had to contract over and over again. Without the VC-funded war chest that our competitors had, we couldn't compete in marketing and sales. Our brand-awareness shrunk into obscurity.
So, in all fairness, we lost the capitalism game. And, I'm fine with that.
| If you're curious, I'm sorry to disappoint. I haven't name-dropped, nor will I now or in the future. |
We had a plan to gracefully wind down, unlike Redbox (archived). Once the balance hit a certain threshold, a plan (prepared a year in advance) would have made everyone whole and return the remaining funds to the investors.
Except, the investors changed their mind and would rather take a chance on a future sale than admit defeat.
What's changed their mind?
| The allure and promise of AI workforce reduction. |
The technology costs are but a single digit percentage of the monthly spend – the majority is tied to headcount and benefits. When I saw the numbers going towards headcount costs, I fully understood the situation we were in.
The previous reduction truly cut headcount to the bare minimum that can still keep the technology we have operating. Any fewer, and there's a high risk of business interruption within a few months.
At the same time, the current revenue projection calls for the end of the business within a few more months.
We used to have a thousand people. Today, I can count everyone on my hands. A cut beyond this will fundamentally need a different operating model.
Given that our revenue can no longer support the staff needed to run our own technology, how do the finances work on someone else's platform?
Assuming that this Software as a Service (SaaS) can deliver what leadership believes, the napkin math suggests it'll work out.
With this SaaS, they expect...
So if they're going to lay everyone off and migrate to a SaaS, who's going to do the migration?
I'll be on my own for an extra month or two to migrate it all over.
Somehow, I need to keep the tech coasting in its last days while migrating all the data that I can.
| Thankfully, AWS is not a source of stress for me. Stuff still works, even if it complains years later. |
| I hear it's rough at Amazon and AWS. A culture where your job is to bandaid things until the next person takes over can't be good for your sanity. Or perpetually fearing you'll be next when Amazon lays off another 30,000 (archived) despite 21.2 billion in net profits (archived). |
I've expected either a winding down or a transition for over a year now. I've come to terms with an ending like this already.
While my peers are bitter about having a closer end date than me, I'm not as emotionally invested into when or how it ends.
What I didn't expect is how a vibe coded app passed as legitimate to the board of directors. We don't even have a contract with this platform yet and people are told they're being laid off.
In my two hours of testing and feedback, I found that — without immediate changes to the SaaS — we'd be immediately in violation of the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA), Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), CAN-SPAM Act, Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
| I keep saying 'we'. It won't be soon. |
How could a platform be that bad? This SaaS has no customers in the United States. Their team is based in another country without similar laws or regulations.
Even so, I'm confident that vibe coded platforms made by people in the United States also unknowingly violate state and federal laws around privacy, communications, and accessibility.
One of our tech acquisitions was through a bankruptcy fire sale after the original company could not make penalty payments for violating the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. These issues cannot be ignored to do business in the United States.
I've used LLM assisted auto complete. I've generated inline functionality. I've generated classes and modules. And I've generated entire web apps. I've seen what GPT, Claude, Z.ai GLM, Grok Code, and Gemeni do across the entire spectrum of software development.
| Everyone has a different definition of "vibe coding", and as Theo described the spectrum of its definitions (at 4:30), I'll be using the slice of the spectrum "Ignoring the code entirely and only prompting" as my definition of vibe coding. |
Within a minute, I could tell it was made with Claude or GLM. Every picture zooms in on hover for no reason. There are cards everywhere. Links go to # in the footer. Modals have an closing X button that doesn't work. The search button up top doesn't do anything...
It's like someone took some screenshots of a competitor, asked an LLM agent to create design documents around all of them, and then implement those design documents without any human review.
| Which, is exactly the kind of workflow Google recommends in their most recent Gemeni 3 and Nano Banana Pro release. |
At the shallowest depth, I can see how a CEO got bamboozled. The happiest path is implemented. The second happiest path is rough. The third happiest path is unhinged.
No hacks. No reading the source code. Just innocent clicking around allowed me to break a critical invariant to running a business: I could place orders without giving my contact details or payment.
Besides displacing jobs, issues like this concern me deeply.
LLM-generated code can enable a business process quicker and cheaper than hiring a full team with benefits. With the experts that still value their craft steering the development, software can be produced just as well as without these tools. Business processes meaningfully affect people's lives, whether staff, customer, vendor, or share-holder.
At its extreme with vibe coding, LLM-generated code will have such poor quality that it is negligent to use LLM-generated code without expert oversight and verification. More lives are going to be affected by negligent software than ever before.
It is so much easier to accept that my life is changing because my employer couldn't stay fit in the economy than to accept it being displaced because of broken software made by a machine. The fiscal performance of my employer in this economy is the root cause, of course. And I accept that. Having to pivot everything to some broken SaaS that breaks the law? That's harder to accept.
| While it is hard to accept, I'll still do my part and will move on after a job well done. How well the new platform operates after the domain swap is not my problem. |
First came Wordpress. Did this crash the demand for web developers? No. It created a platform and marketplace for more sites to be built. More developers joined the space because of Wordpress or other Content Management Systems (CMS). Then came Wix, Shopify, and Squarespace with cloud-hosted solutions with accessible website and commerce building tools. Did this crash the demand for web developers? No, not really.
Cloud-hosted site builders let businesses skip the burdensome step of paying a freelancer a thousand plus to represent themselves on the internet. Many small businesses that serve a local or niche community need only enough to show up on Facebook and Google. That online thing is a distraction to running a business. They’re focused on customers, hiring, and sourcing their resources. As a result, cloud-hosted site builders did displace some freelancers for fledgeling businesses and sole proprieters.
| If Wix existed when I was a teen, I wouldn’t have had the opportunity or meager funding to practice web development. |
Once a small business grows to where it needs a better representation online, then a developer will be pulled in to do a better job. Instead of developing it from scratch, they need to deliver it economically. Once released, the owner might not want to update it for another few years. For that reason, and within those constraints, it is typically redone in Wordpress, or a site builder, to represent the brand while leaving the non-technical owner some accessible controls to edit their site's content at any time.
They might also contract or sub-contract a marketing team to contribute copy, flavor text, source some images, and otherwise decorate the online brand without the owner nit-picking or reviewing every detail. There will be some inaccuracies, but this won’t influence customer behavior much.
| Copy, in the context of publishing (which includes websites), refers to the content (text and graphics) reproduced for others to see. |
Once the business grows again, it will be redone with a bespoke solution by web developers that attend to it over the business's lifetime. Over the years, the team may be contracted months apart to maintain it, and that's fine. Their team knows how to manage the bespoke machine this business needs and the marketing team involved is more in touch with reality at this stage.
Wordpress and site builders raise the minimum business size from a sole proprietor to one with more than $40,000 of revenue per month. The businesses that succeed will need technology to represent themselves.
| That’s a rather arbitrary figure! |
| I figure that paying at least eight part time staff, rent, resources, and your own benefits would at least need that much money each month going in, around, and out. |
What about lovable and other AI tools?
Cloud-hosted AI-site builders are sandwiched somewhere between Wordpress and pre-AI site builders in their target demographic. AI-site builders are like having a small contractor that sets up a CMS and fill it with copy, but cheaper.
At first it’ll please the business owner, who feels great having only spent $200 instead of $2000. But, will they stand out over their competition using Wix? A smidge, maybe? Customers don't care, though. Their service, their products, their pricing, ease of transaction, and accessibility are what matter.
By using site builders of any kind, that money saved is available for other uses that customers actually respond to. Though, customers may be confused as to why parts of the website are horribly wrong.
Lovable and other cloud-hosted AI-site builders will displace some of the low-value contracts.
How about the other AI thing? That vibe coding one? It’s a little different.
If a small business cannot safely self-host Wordpress – which they cannot – why should they try to self-host generated code? Vibe coding tends to produce a Next.js app, which isn't trivial to deploy and operate on your own infrastructure.
| Keep in mind, technologists, most small businesses don't have that guy who can set up infrastructure and deploy code. |
It gets easier when you look to use a serverless provider like Vercel, which owns Next.js. But a variable cost between $5 and a surprise $3000 bill would prompt any vibe coder to abandon the abyssal spaghetti they spawned.
| I've evaluated Next.js across multiple projects – both at work and for a furry convention. My opinions are not compatible with Vercel. My frontend should not take more memory at idle than my backend. |
Vibe coding to production with ones own infrastructure is just not realistic for the non-technical person. It is too difficult to consider viable.
Small businesses will try out AI-site builders as long as the subscription costs are predictable and capped. They prolong a business's runway of self-reliance until they need to involve experts. When their needs are better understood and they have the money to pay a team for their work, they'll engage with experienced people.
That said, it is likely that these contract teams will use generative tech and site builders to produce the next long term revision of a business’s online presentation. That’s fine, since they know the domain. It means they can take on more work concurrently without growing staff. Whether the results are pleasant or long-lasting is another matter entirely.
| I’ve seen my place take on contract work with non-technical businesses to represent them online while integrating with our business. Several times. They always churn after a year or two once the contract ends. |
| I can say the product their next contract made is inferior, but their customers haven’t changed before, during, or after our work. So is the business in the wrong for switching away to something cheaper? No. |
| What a waste of our time though. Internally we always plan like it’s going to be in place for five years and it flops before two. We haven’t done that for a few years now, thankfully. |
Generative tech will not significantly displace web developers through use by non-developers. Exports with generative tech will be able to price out those that don’t and it will appear more crowded for a while. Some will be displaced because the demand is now met with less supply at the business size that needs web developers.
We’ll have a worse web as more slop-sites come to be through people that know better. But the market doesn’t care what the quality is, so long as there’s more of it.
"},{"id":"https://cendyne.dev/posts/2025-08-21-vibe-codings-hype-for-non-developers-is-over.html","url":"https://cendyne.dev/posts/2025-08-21-vibe-codings-hype-for-non-developers-is-over.html","title":"Vibe Coding's Hype for non-developers is over","summary":"The collective hallucination is coming to an end. Vibe Coding doesn't work for non-technical people.","date_published":"2025-08-21T15:00:00.000Z","banner_image":"https://c.cdyn.dev/y3UfXSSb","content_html":"The drivel from wannabe LinkedInfluencers are finally facing reality. $200 Claude Code and Cursor plans have not replaced developers with real-world experience. To the dismay of any aspiring yet-another-software-as-a-service founder, all their work through AI coding assistants collapse when the context no longer fit the abyssal spaghetti they spawned through an expensive subscription to the largest bubble in history.
Real-time inference services are responsible for displacing jobs in services, support, human resources, and artistic roles in the video game industry (archived). While it has displaced paid human roles with underperforming alternatives, has it truly displaced software developers? AI has been the excuse for executives all over to cut headcount again and again because of speculation and greed.
There is no product or service that can responsibly design and release software on its own. There is no builder.ai that companies can augment or replace their workforce with.
2025's AI Tech cannot write software on its own.
Non-technical vibe coders have finally caught on to this reality. The hype bubble they've hoped for is ripping apart. Dreams are being shattered and future visions of riches are floating away like a fart in the wind.
| In defense of Karpathy, who coined the term—the concept of vibe coding in the zeitgeist quickly outgrew his original usage of it. He was referring to throwaway weekend projects where the LLM would, largely, step in for the role of domain knowledge when hacking on something in an unfamiliar field. |
what's the point of vibe coding if at the end of the day i still gotta pay a dev to look at the code anyway. sure it feels kinda cool while i'm typing, like i'm in some flow state or whatever, but when stuff breaks it's just dead weight. i cant vibe my way through debugging, i cant ship anything that actually matters, and then i'm back to square one pulling out my wallet for someone who actually knows what they're doing. makes me think vibe coding is just roleplay for guys who want to feel like hackers without doing the hard part. am i missing something here or is it really just useless once you step outside the fantasy - reddit (archived)
Andrea Bosoni:
I think I’m going to give up on vibe coding for now. I tried building something but besides the nice initial design I always end up stuck with errors.
The tools try to fix them but most of the time they fail. The process takes so many trials (and credits!) that it becomes incredibly frustrating.
For example fixing a simple “mark as completed” button that wasn’t working took me hours. And then after a few iterations it stopped working again.
I’m not technical so I have no idea if what the tools are doing is right or not. I’m sure one day they will work even for someone like me but they’re not there yet. source
Gergely Orosz:
Seeing more posts like this (and I don’t mean to single out Andrea!)
After enthusiasm thanks to rapid progress —> a few months of increasing pain —> giving up
Turns out having a tool that generates code doesn’t remove the need to know how to program to build complex software… source
Anyone touching grass in this industry could tell you up front that real skill, experience, and opinions matter in developing software. A shortcut through an AI subscription will shine brightly in its first hours — then violently crumble once it reaches production.
On the bright side, non-technical people getting into software development is a good thing. Gatekeeping is harmful. These tools make it easier for newcomers to selectively choose where to develop skills without having to learn what a CPU register is. However…
Alberta Tech:Vibe coding fixed my impostor syndrome source
Those dependent upon these tools will have to wean themselves off to get real work done. And not just because the internet goes out on the plane.
| To me, vibe coding feels a lot like cheating when playing a game. I don’t mean getting an unfair advantage. I mean sacrificing your own development for the short-term reward of winning. |
| Cheating at chess does not make you better at chess. It makes you dependent on the chess engine. |
Software has to be intentionally designed to solve problems that affect real people. Most software development time is spent understanding the problem and shaping a solution for that problem within the existing systems we use today.
| I think this is by and large why we call them software engineers rather than programmers today. |
Gergely Orosz:
The evolution of "vibe coding production software as a non-dev" the last few months
Success stories do exist... ones I see all come from people who are/were software engineers
Learning to code / build software not a waste after all?source
These tools can make some development processes faster, especially auto-complete. But they will not replace people.
The most success I have had from LLM assistants is all where I can drive it, check its work, and review the proposals in manageable chunks. Hey, wait a minute, is this just pull request-based software development!? |
Any displacement of experienced staff is, at this time, purely out of speculation and not grounded in reality.
However, the consistent years-long contraction in this career field forces experienced people to compete for the positions that normally would go to new graduates in computer science. Salaries are dropping. Supply has exceeded demand, and that's tough for new graduates.
| It's not even worth job hopping for me at the moment. Salaries and benefits in the market cannot compete with what I've gotten after staying during the great resignation. For a while, I regretted staying, but now I don't. |
It's not all roses for the developers (or their employees) who delegate half their brain to these tools.
Gergely Orosz:
We’ve gone so quickly from “not sure I want to pay $20/month for another AI coding tool when I already pay $20/mo for one” to “my $200/month subscription keeps running out of limits- help!!”
Devs actively using LLMs for work are trending to pay easily $1,000+/month soon… source
This abuse became so rampant, whether through automation or an unhealthy obsession with exploiting the free agents while they lasted.
typedfemale:
man adopts polyphasic sleep schedule due to claude code usage limitssource
Thankfully, the volume of this drivel is shrinking since Cursor and Claude announced limits and pricing changes to make their plans more financially sustainable.
These new prices affect me too. I'll have to deal with it. It's been really handy to knock out boilerplate with a style guide in hand. For example, I can save ten minutes of finding-and-replacing through a request including a generated style guide (based on an existing implementation) and a typescript interface for yet another entity in Cloudflare KV.
| I got introduced to WebGL2 because of my time with these tools. Now I have an understanding of what's going on in the GLTF format, Blender's meshes, UV maps, shape keys and more because I learned and read about 3D rendering through WebGL2 Fundamentals. |
But, now, I have to stop and think every time I want to use the agent. Is this request worth burning my monthly quota over? That actually slows me down. And that sucks too!
Anthropic:
We’re rolling out new weekly rate limits for Claude Pro and Max in late August. We estimate they’ll apply to less than 5% of subscribers based on current usage.source
The hypnotic feedback loop of perceived progress for vibe coders is coming to an end.
| It really is hypnotic. I've experienced it myself. I've wanted to forgo sleep in order to do more of it. There is a thrill to getting stuff done and seeing progress happen in hours instead of weeks. It is the dream a manager has of their team. |
| In my experience, a lot of technologists enjoy watching machines at work. Seeing what they can do. Spotting their limits, taking notes, improving the next iteration. Agentic LLM coding is like that. |
| I've seen how fast people are over the last five years of managing and mentoring a team. People are really slow. |
| When I delegate everything over to these tools, software comes out fast but it never quite fits in with the code in the project. The models have different biases and each inference session develops a different style. The context can never fit everything that represents the existing work, the new work, and the goal to achieve. As a result, it builds a confusing Frankenstein over the course of a single week. How will it look over years as new models come out? |
| People are great at conforming. The code that they make tends to fit in with the code that already exists. Sometimes it's shaped weirdly, but that's what code review and linters are for. |
There is no more free lunch – only crumbs left to be had for $20-200 per month.
Hopefully, this slop from LinkedIn and other influencer platforms fades and is left behind before 2026. And, for my peers, I hope your CEOs stop laying you off and focus on real things that genuinely improve humanity's future.
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