So you have decided to start on that long-awaited, from-scratch todo app. There are millions of such apps but this will be yours. Something tailored for your unique workflow.
Normally you wouldn’t even take up such an endeavour. Any handwritten code takes time. And time is one thing you don’t have. Doesn’t help that you also write code for a living.
But now you are more confident. Thanks to the LLMs you don’t have to hand type any of it. It helps that you are a good software engineer with experience in an adjacent area.
As is your way of developing software, you start with a small spike or, in normie terms, a proof of concept.
You type in instructions meticulously, constraining the agent to your wishes. You always had a way with the agents.
The latest one named Pol would be no different. It has been ranking way up in the benchmarks. They all get better over time, so if anything, this would be easier than a month ago.
You set the agent to crunch the code, go on with your regular work or maybe go to sleep. After all, the agents are quite autonomous these days.
You wake up and, as is the ritual, walk over to your desk to check on Pol. It is always thrilling to check out the first cuts. They are crude, unpolished, error-prone but rewarding. Creating something out of nothing. From a thought to working software. As if magic and witchcraft has finally come true.
The first glance doesn’t show any software yet. Hmm, that cannot be right. Did you run it even? With some self-doubt you switch to Pol’s dinky little terminal.
0% weekly usage. Reset will be 7 days from now.
You stare at it confused. Pre-caffeine brain refusing to comprehend the implications of it. Or maybe not wanting to. You just had your weekly reset yesterday so this has to be a mistake.
You frantically type commands to check on the usage and status. All show the same conclusion. Somehow over the last 12 hours, Pol has meticulously, methodically, magically drained your entire weekly quota. Billions of tokens vanished into thin air. Poof.
You are not a slouch. You are not a vibe coder. So you dig into the project code. To understand if Pol recreated Windows 12 by mistake or maybe GTA 7.
The repo is mostly empty except for a single subfolder named ‘tests’. You dig into it. More subfolders. Each with a meticulously generated sha256 hash of its own.
Each covering an edge case your app will have to jump through hoops to reach.
Each test pristine and covering a corner case that will never be hit. A 10-million-token burn to ensure no human has to ever hit any issue with the app. And they never will hit anything either because the app itself is nowhere to be seen. Not even a placeholder or todo.
Then it comes to you. The reason for over-orchestration. The reason for overengineering. The reason for overly paranoid test coverage.
It’s because millions of vibe coders have trained it over the months into something that can one-shot everything without issues. It just uses 10x as many tokens as before. A price they are willing to pay to not have to ever look at the code.
A price that’s essentially a tax on all other regular software developers.
A Vibe Tax