Startups are often interesting places to work at unless the boss is incompetent!

This employee shares how his workplace was a complete mess because of coding disasters.

Check out the full story.

Vibecoding Disaster

So I took a job at a small startup with a decent-sounding idea, some seed money, and the classic promise that we were going to “move fast.”

Reader, we moved fast. We moved so fast we achieved time travel, briefly, because we managed to build the end of the project before we built the beginning.

This is where it begins…

Week 1: I am bootstrapping infrastructure. You know, the boring adult stuff. Repos, environments, logging, deployment, the things you only notice are missing when everything is on fire and you are holding a bucket labeled “hope.”

Meanwhile the CEO is vibing. Very high-energy. Very visionary. The kind of person who says “We can totally ship in two sprints” the way other people say “We can totally microwave metal.”

Then comes The Long Weekend.

Monday morning I open the repo and the git log looks like a crime scene.

One commit.

Twenty thousand lines.

Every file touched.

UH OH…

I am not exaggerating when I say the commit message might as well have been: “did stuff lol.”

I ask, as gently as a human can, “Hey, did you run it?”

He says, with the confidence of a man who has never been harmed by his own decisions, “It should work.”

It did not.

The thing about massive unreviewed commits is that you do not debug them. You do not fix them. You do archaeology. You put on gloves. You try not to disturb the dust. You whisper apologies to the ancestors.

I pull the code and try to build it.

It fails immediately, which at least was mercifully honest.

I ask where the unit tests are.

He was simply trying to understand the whole situation…

He says, and I will remember this line until I die, “The AI does not understand unit tests because it does not understand the environment variable to turn them on.”

This is a real sentence said by a real person in the waking world.

At this point I realize we have not built an application. We have built a new genre of literature: speculative executable fiction.

I try to explain incremental development.

You know the concept: keep it green. Add one small feature. Add a test. Keep it green. Repeat. A gentle staircase to working software, as opposed to cliff-diving into a landfill of diff noise.

He nods like he understands. Very apologetic. Very earnest.

That’s INSANE!

Then, as if guided by forces older than reason, he disappears again.

Seventy-two hours later he returns with another grenade commit. This one touches everything plus a file called something like “final_final_working_v7_real.py” which I can only assume is a cry for help.

I start adding logging because I need to know what is real.

I wire up log levels. I put in structured output. I start building a feedback loop because right now we are basically driving at night with the headlights turned off because “the car should know the road.”

Finally, I get logging working.

The logs reveal the truth.

Nothing is happening.

The entire “working” system is a print statement.

UH OH…

Not even a good print statement. Not like “Processed 10,000 records” where you could at least pretend. It was more like:

print(“Success!”)

It is hard to describe the feeling of discovering that you have spent months standing in front of a cardboard fireplace while someone behind you makes crackling sounds with cellophane and goes, “See? Working.”

At some point, the company runs out of money. The seed funding falls off a cliff. The team gets reassigned to a different product “with the best chance of success.”

Plot twist: the new product duplicates the functionality of the old product.

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I ask why we are building a second app that does the same thing as the first app that does nothing.

The CEO looks me dead in the eyes and says, “Because I do not know how to work with other people.”

He knows what is up!

I respect the honesty. I do. I just wish it had arrived before the 20,000-line weekend novella.

So now I am in the most modern of roles: the guy asked to fix the foundation after the house has been built, while someone across the street starts building another identical house out of print statements.

My morale is low. My git blame is high.

If anyone needs me, I will be in the corner rocking back and forth whispering “small PRs” and “CI gates” like they are prayers.

Anyway. If you are ever tempted to measure progress by lines of code, I have good news: in 2026, you can generate infinity lines of code in a weekend. It will cost you $1,000 a week and deliver approximately one (1) print statement.

But it will print very confidently.

YIKES! That is quite an office experience!

Let’s find out what folks on Reddit think about this one.

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