Tomer Tunguz：软件是养出来的还是设计出来的

Do we grow software or do we design it?

Vibe-coding is growing software. Start with the germ of the idea. Iterate on it. Let’s try this. Poke the petri dish with a bit of glucose ; oh, that didn’t work. Maybe some thymol blue to see if the colony is alive? Time to start again.

The most sophisticated vibe-coders test with 4-5 different petri dishes in parallel & pick the one whose bacteria have evolved optimally.

Designed software in the AI era is state machine design : flow charts that work. First, the email comes in. Three options : archive, add to the CRM, or escalate to a person. If adding to the CRM, determine the company’s stage.

When co-designing a state machine with AI, ask for the flowchart. The AI willingly shares schematics. Lay out every fork in a table with the right outcome. The holes jump out immediately. Plus, formal verification proves the software will work as intended.

Boris explains why.¹

Growing software is organic. We can just program! State-machines are mechanical, industrial, & rigid : great for core systems that must work.

Software engineering has many philosophies : test-driven development,² pair programming,³ move fast & break things.⁴ In this new era, we add two more.

Boris Cherny on formally verifying the Claude Agent SDK with Lean & TLA+. ↩︎
Test-Driven Development (TDD), popularized by Kent Beck in ‘Test-Driven Development: By Example’ (2002), dictates writing automated test cases before writing the minimal production code necessary to pass them. ↩︎
Pair programming, a core practice of Extreme Programming (XP), pairs two developers at one workstation : one ‘driver’ typing code while the other ’navigator’ reviews and plans strategic direction in real time. ↩︎
‘Move fast and break things’ was Facebook’s early internal motto, celebrated by Mark Zuckerberg as a mandate to accept collateral bugs as the acceptable cost of developer velocity, later replaced in 2014 by ‘Move fast with stable infra.’ ↩︎