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Elon famously says that he prefers to hire lazy people because “You can always count on a lazy person only wanting to do something one time”. This sounds like Elon being himself, but it’s one of the most important lessons to learn in building software. You aren’t building to repetitively do work over and over, you’re building to not do a certain thing ever again. The goal of all software, at it’s core, is automation.

In World War II, there was a general that categorized his officer ranks into four groups. The first was Intelligent and lazy, he posited that these people were suited for command because you could count on them finding the easiest way to do something (seeing a pattern here?). The second group was intelligent and industrious, he said that this group was suited for high level staff positions, meaning they were capable of a lot of value but shouldn’t be in charge because of a propensity to prioritize doing any work over doing the right work. The third group was lazy and stupid. Ironically, he did not think this was the worst group. He posited that the lazy and stupid were an unfortunate byproduct of the system, but you could always find a place for them. The fourth group, stupid and industrious, he ordered to immediately be removed from the officer ranks and dismissed from the army. His firm belief was that this most dangerous group was capable of a ton of organizational harm and had to be identified and appropriately managed.

This is a lot like building with LLMs, and it’s also what you as a builder using LLMs needs to watch out for in your own building. The current AI coding systems are the epitome of stupid and industrious. You can watch this in action just by allowing one to code a project without intervening. Things get out of hand quick.

What does this mean for vibe coding? It means the best skill that you can possibly work on is asking the right questions, because LLMS are great at contextualizing, but they have really poor insight. Move slowly and deliberately, ask the right questions, and treat every piece of code you push like you never want to touch that code again.

Now, go build some shit.

-Nate

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Hi, I’m Nate. I’m a career startup software engineer, and I’ve been involved in 0 to 1 and early stage software projects for a decade now. I wrote and helped contribute to many projects before the advent of AI and many projects after.

1. Want to build? I think you can do it.

There’s a lot of people arguing about if “not previously technical” people can build on their own now, or if the Lovables and Replits of the world are just a mess waiting to happen. I think both are true (don’t love the previously mentioned but we’ll get to that). You can do this, but people don’t hire Senior Engineers because they can beep boop code onto a screen, it’s because of what they’ve seen and what their experience allows them to avoid effortlessly. Luckily, I can help you with that.

2. What are we going to cover?

None of us really need to “write” code anymore, but creating code in general has all of the same potholes it used to. So while LLMs have opened the doors of programming to you, you still need to know what a pothole looks like. Luckily it’s as easy as someone saying “Hey, look out for that pothole”. Software patterns, systems architecture, security, scalability, devops, databases, we’ll try to cover it all, and like the name suggests, I’ll leave you with the prompts that will help you find your way.

3. This blog will save you real money (like a lot).

In recent years I have been advising a lot on software projects, and as fate would have it, the majority of the 100k+ in fees that have been paid to me have been spent by me helping them avoid or correct the same common issues over and over again. Not only is it my personal goal to save you as much time and money as possible, but I will also save you or make you actual money through little known tips, tricks, or like, just actual links to free money.

So there you have it. I think you should go build your crazy ideas, and you should tell the people saying you can’t to shove it. But AI can’t currently save you from all the things waiting to make you have a bad day, so maybe go build recklessly, but maybe also read this newsletter just in case.

Love,

Nate