Engineering is no longer construction: it is verification.
Why Vibe Coding is the most expensive technical debt in history.
I sat in a room last week that smelled like accelerationist fumes and unearned confidence.
A presenter stood up, hammered a desk, and told the room that Software Engineering is dead. His timeline: 24 months. His advice: stop hiring developers and start lighting money on fire. He wants every “engineer” to spend $10,000 a month on tokens.
He was pitching the Steve Yegge “Gas Town” thesis, but he missed the subtext. In Gas Town, you don’t build elegant, hand-crafted machines. You bolt a jet engine onto a rusted tractor and pray the welds hold while you burn “gas” (tokens) to plow through a mountain of context.
They can try to rebrand it ‘Agentic Engineering’ all they want, but the room was high on the sugar rush of Vibe coding. People are speaking their intent into Superwhisper like they’re narrating a dream, managing agent swarms in TMUX, and watching AI build entire features that they’ll inevitably have to delete in three weeks when the first edge case hits.
The presenter is half-right. Construction is a commodity.
The era of the construction worker engineer is over. If your primary value is being a human IDE (manually assembling syntax, boilerplate, and CRUD apps) the Ghost in the machine has already retired you. You are just a slow, expensive version of a 100ms API call.
But the presenter is fundamentally wrong about the end of Engineering.
Engineering has never been about the act of pouring concrete. It is about the math that ensures the bridge doesn’t collapse when the wind hits 80 mph. In the age of Gas Town, the role of the engineer has shifted from building the system to Verifying the Output.
The “Reasoning” Circular Tax
We are currently trapped in a “Confidence Loop” that is costing us billions.
The 10k-token-per-month crowd believes that if a model is “in-distribution,” it will never fail. They think PhD-level reasoning scores on a benchmark mean they can leave their agents unsupervised in a production database.
This is the “Confident Idiot” fallacy at scale.
As a Senior ML Engineer, I see the “Lobotomy” every day. You build a 15-step autonomous agent that looks like AGI in a demo. Then you ship it. On Day 1, it hallucinates a refund policy that doesn’t exist. On Day 2, it decides the best way to “optimize” a table is to DROP it.
The current “Gas Town” solution to this is to pay a “Reasoning Tax.”
You take your expensive Generalist Model and you pay for a second, even more expensive “Judge Model” to check its work. You are paying the OpenAI Tax twice to get a “vibe-check” on your logic. It is a circular, probabilistic nightmare that treats your gross margins like a suggestion.
It’s like hiring a construction worker who might accidentally build the stairs upside down, and then hiring a second construction worker to stand there and guess if the stairs look right.
That isn’t engineering. That’s a circus.
Trust is the New Scarcity
When a bridge is built, nobody cares how fast the concrete was poured. They care that the structural integrity was verified against the laws of physics.
In software, we’ve spent forty years building deterministic gates: compilers, type-checkers, unit tests. Now that the construction is “free,” we’ve panicked and thrown away the gates. We’ve replaced deterministic safety with “I hope this helps!” and a prayer.
We are lobotomizing our agents because we lack the infrastructure to verify them. We strip away their authority, turn off their tools, and relegate them to “Assistive” tasks because we are terrified of the 5% tail risk.
Engineering is not dead. It is just becoming a high-stakes audit.
Construction is free. Verification is the only thing that matters.
If you’re tired of babysitting “Confident Idiots,” I built Steer. It uses deterministic Reality Locks to stop the lobotomy: https://github.com/imtt-dev/steer