The Wall - by George Kedenburg III - gk3.fyi
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The Wall<br>vibe coding, taste, and the part that doesn’t get easier.
George Kedenburg III<br>Jun 15, 2026
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I actually started writing this note over a year ago. I got about halfway, hit a section I couldn’t figure out, and promptly found something else to think about instead. I picked it back up early last week, and by pure coincidence the model that finally got me over that tricky section came out the day after I began.<br>I have a long history of procrastinating when I get stuck. Part of it is struggling to hit my own self-imposed quality bar, especially with writing. But lately that habit has developed a weird little loophole. I hit a wall, leave the idea on the shelf, and by the time I come back with the same idea and the same brain, a new model has shown up that can get me over the hump (at the quality level I need).<br>I’m not holding this up as an endorsement of procrastination. It has just worked out that way an embarrassing number of times for me lately — today with this note, but usually with a prototype.<br>the wall of good enough
Before LLMs appeared, the only way I could turn a crazy idea into something tangible was the long path : trudging through confusing documentation, piecing together disparate tutorials, and getting a hundred tiny paper cuts along the way. It’s a difficult path, but manageable since it spreads the struggle out over days and weeks. The reward is collecting all the learnings as you climb. By the time I get to something worth polishing, I understand every piece because I placed every piece by hand.<br>Now, we have this magical short path where you describe what you want in plain English and the model practically teleports you to ~80% done, skipping most of the trudging (and all of the learning). Prototypes that used to take me weeks now take hours, maybe days.
The short path feels incredible right up until something isn’t quite what you wanted. Which is basically always. You can’t really tune it yourself, because you have no idea how it works (you skipped that part, remember?). You can try to ask the model to “make it fire,” but pretty quickly that stops feeling like building and starts feeling like gambling. Tweak the prompt, pull the lever. Paste in some references, pull the lever. Type in all caps, promise the model a billion dollars, pull the lever. Two steps forward, one to three steps backwards, every time.<br>This is the wall of good enough . It is the painfully steep climb from something to the thing. Steep because we have compressed the journey of the long path into a prompt and a dream.
I’ve spent the past four years regularly traveling the short path, and I’ve hit the wall a lot. I started early, well before anyone was calling this vibe coding, when I discovered that I could get GPT-3 to help me write Python prototypes by copy and pasting code blocks in and out of the OpenAI playground. I had zero Python experience, and yet I managed to climb the wall over and over, making some of the most interesting prototypes of my career.<br>Four years feels like forty in AI time. Going from GPT-3 to Fable is like going from a unicycle to a rocket. Watching these model generations go by, I’ve learned that the wall is never quite as tall as the last time I hit it.<br>the summarizer
A while ago, I had an idea for an Ai Pin feature that would intelligently summarize my phone’s notifications for me, well before Apple Intelligence made this a reality. I knew there was some ancient Bluetooth magic buried in iOS that would let a third-party device consume all of your notifications, but I’d never built anything with Bluetooth before. By now we were in the GPT-4 era, and while I got kinda close, it never worked reliably enough to make for a compelling demo. It took me two weeks just to work out how to parse the raw notification bytes, and even then it only connected one try in ten.<br>The model couldn’t get me over the wall. I spun my wheels on it for far too long and finally shelved it. The slot machine was consuming my entire life.<br>Almost a year later, I was still daydreaming about this idea (always a good sign when something sticks with you like that) so I felt like it was worth another try. This time, I got it working almost perfectly in about a day. Same idea, same ancient Bluetooth magic, same me. The only thing that changed was the model. The wall I hit before had shrunk while I wasn’t looking.
self-driving computers
From a distance, that’s the story of the past few years. Every model generation shrinks the wall a little more. Agentic tools like Claude Code don’t just hand you code blocks. They read your whole repo, make a plan, fix their own mistakes, and climb a surprising amount of that final stretch with you. Walls that were once towering over you are now little fences (though sometimes with barbed wire).<br>We basically have self-driving cars for software now, but getting into a Waymo doesn’t mean you’re going...