A recent client engagement was tough. The client had to meet stringent external deadlines for a product that needed a lot of custom code. Worse, the requirements -- business rules, input and output formats, reporting, etc. -- were scattered across many Word and PDF documents, Excel workbooks, and data schemas. In short, it was far too much for the small team to manually attend to and build upon.
The date was October 2025, and the answer then was to build a workflow using LangChain to combine multiple LLM prompts, CLIs, and input, output, and code exemplars. The guiding principle was to use the workflow to progressively improve the results. Don't manually improve the generated code; instead, refine the workflow and regenerate everything. Ie, update the prompts, change models, tighten the CLIs, improve the exemplars, reduce token use, and batch to speed generation.
It worked, until the engagement changed. New deadlines forced manual intervention with the code. Time and effort placed there took away from refining the workflow. Then more people were added to the team. The generated code became a legacy codebase to modify rather than to regenerate. Client senior management then effectively mandated vibe coding: "I don't care about quality, only features." Then a client's senior developer introduced a Claude Code skill that imitated the workflow's results but learned nothing from the experience of the original team.
The codebase is now a mess. Many "eras" of changing coding practices that we typically see in legacy codebases have now arrived in months instead of years. Updating the code has become progressively more difficult. Vibe coding, which once brought speed, is now needed just to deal with complexity. Deadlines were met, features were released, and no one believes the product is maintainable.
The software development world has changed substantially since October 2025. This experience is likely just an example of us learning how to use these new tools better. I'm thinking that in our industry's timeline, the 2025–2026 period will be the strata equivalent of when the asteroid hit and killed off the dinosaurs. A black smudge.
(I must note that the original workflow was designed and implemented by two brilliant colleagues.)
