This is great advice (that we need to follow) but needs to be updated for 2026. The information value of providing (or receiving) a demo has dropped to roughly zero with vibe coding. Today, an apparently functional and useful product can be produced and demoed in minutes, but that demo provides absolutely zero information into the technical capabilities of the demoing team to follow through on promises with polish and at scale. It doesn't reflect a studied architecture or edge case handling. It basically only shows a vision, which can be tailored to perfectly mirror the recipient's expressed desire even though it's absolute vaporware. This makes it even harder to sell to enterprise in 2026 when the scene is awash in such noise.
>that demo provides absolutely zero information into the technical capabilities of the demoing team to follow through on promises with polish and at scale.
With vibe coding comes vibes-based capital. I'm only half kidding.
Speed to market has always been a factor. Venture prioritizing this factor due to AI accelarating speed is probably expanding ... for now. In bubbles, speed tends to rise to a higher priority.
Yes, first/fast is sometimes a negative factor (e.g. first to market doesn't mean best, second to market can take advantage of proof of market proviced by first, etc.)
In my experience demos are half about the product and half about the team / company behind it. So I wouldn’t call its value zero: part of the reason a potential client is asking for a demo is to see if there’s actually a real, intelligent company behind the product.
The sales pitch needs to compete with other pitches, so I gotta imagine in a vibe-heavy market a solid sales team is gonna lead with all the stuff you can’t vibe.
Customer transaction numbers, service response times, human staffing for VIP customer service, and human engineers who are recognized domain experts. The cliche live call to customer support with some hairy-ass customer specific problem.
Plus vibe-upselling of vibe-integrations for whatever Wonderful Engineering the customer has with your profit centres.
And frankly visually being able to explain how your product beats the competition is more important than writing lines of code for a product that could be DOA.
However not everyone can do this. So the scientific approach gets pushed.
Right, and the story now shifts to: What's your customer service & support model? How can you prove this is stable and that you can maintain it? Who is going to handle the pages in the middle of the night?
All those things are beyond the demo itself. Vibe-coded demos are just demos. There are stability, security and everything enterprise that still needs to be added to a demo to actually make it functional as a paid offering.
> It was a cliche for many years that Microsoft Word had "too many features." So people would start companies to sell "lightweight word processors" that only implemented "the most used 20% of features." And most of these companies sank without a trace (with a couple of admirable exceptions that hyperfocused on specific niches). Google finally made progress against the monopoly, but to it, they actually invested in a huge number of features.
The other issue is that yes, perhaps most users only use 20% of the features, but each user uses a different 20% of the features in products like Word. Trust me, it's super hard to get it right even at the end-user level, let alone the enterprise level like you say.
There are at most 5% of the features of word that are common to everyone. Things like spell check everyone uses. Actually I suspect it is more like 0.1% of the features are common, and most people use about 0.3% of the features and power users get up to 5% of the features - but I don't have data, just a guess.
Yeah but 98% of Word features were buried in like 2004. They were added when it was a selling point to use unicorn and gnome icons as your table border in under 100mb of RAM. So we’re talking about 20% of the limited set of features that remain not just for backwards compatibility.
And there's some company out there that has very important Word documents that will fail to open if you take away the unicorn and gnome icons table border feature.
But of more interest to this group is probably our blog! Our latest post is about Gary Kildall's blunder quibbling over an NDA redline with IBM who was looking to give its entire enterprise away: https://tritium.legal/blog/redlining.
I love them both too but that might not be the best metric unless you’re planning to run lots of little read queries. If you’re doing CRUD, simulating that workflow may favor Postgres given the transactional read/write work that needs to take place across multiple concurrent connections.
Not sure that’s always right either though. For example Mapbox used to use an SQLite database as the disk cache for map tile info. You cannot possibly store that amount of data in memory, so it’s a great use case.
lol! yes, typo. I don't blame her, but man Freud might disagree.
Reading that comment again (which I can't edit now), I would like to make it clear I was just responding to the OP's note that the bad was super tight in that set.
> 24/7 running coding agents are pretty clearly the direction the industry is going now.
This assertion needs some support for those of us that don't have a macro insight into the industry. Are you seeing this from within FAANG shops? As a solo developer? What? Honest question.
I'm speaking from my daily experience. Sometimes i don't want to close my laptop before going to bed because there are still 1-2 tasks ongoing in my AI kanban board, so I just leave my laptop open (lock but not suspend it) so that the agents keep working for a while. I don't even have things all that automated.
I anticipate that once I have some more complex agentic scaffolds set up to do things like automatically explore promising directions for the project, then leaving the AI system on overnight becomes a necessity.
I also have Claude Cowork automations running constantly. As-is, I can't shut down my laptop, and it gets frustrating when my laptop is in my backpack all day because of commutes or travel.
Such a law illustrates the beauty of federalism. Texas and other states can have them if they want them! Maine has not nearly as much space and much more natural beauty to protect [per square mile], so it can and maybe should have a different set of rules. That's cool.
This is a recipe for creating dead retiree states. Just NIMBY everything, NIMBY the power sources[1] [2], then complain about a lack of power so NIMBY any type of new industrial <anything>.
Now do this for housing, new sources of water anything a person younger than 40 would need and you basically get a state full of retirees..and oh would you look at that! [3].
Now the question is, why wouldn't all states eventually do this with the way our population pyramid is looking? It's basically rabid conservation and tragedy of the commons writ large.
It's the opposite of NIMBY. It's smart thoughtful policy and it is NOT a simple ban. Nobody bothers to read passed the title but the main piece of this legislation is the creation of the Maine Data Center Coordination Council.
Alongside it is a temporary (until Nov 2027) moratorium on data centers over 20 megawatts. This seems to be in place so they could establish a proper legal and environmental framework for building out data centers in the future.
This is exactly the kind of approach to legislation we should all hope our local representatives are competent enough to do.
Appointing a council of elders who will think through every imagined horror before approving a project (or a “framework”) is basically the textbook definition of NIMBY-ism.
Every NIMBY thinks they’re being optimally thoughtful (tm), except the answer is always the same, two years of environment studies, followed by a loud resounding “No”.
Why would they approve anything? They have no incentive to.
C'mon. Be reasonable for a second. Or at the very least actually read past the title before commenting.
This is actively seeking to reduce NIMBYism
> As part of the moratorium, Maine’s Data Center Coordination Council would study and oversee the environmental impact and electricity bill increases datacenters often bring to local residents and “consider data-sharing requirements and processes for proposed datacenters.”
The EPA comparison is moot. Data centers don’t dump chemicals into the water or emit toxic gasses. A data center is not more or less resource intensive than your typical factory. All already regulated.
What you’re asking for is an EPA for “do I approve of what this data center is used for?”. Which is insane.
What about the Department of Energy or Department of Education or Department of Commerce? Why not just do away with government in general. Let corporations do what they want
Yeah I think in a lot of cases getting rid of a government bureaucracy and replacing it with nothing would result in better outcomes for more people than continuing to let the government bureaucracy continue to exist and work counterproductively against good market outcomes because those good market outcomes impact a special interest group that's been able to gain poltical control of that bureaucracy. This is exactly what has happened with the Department of Education and it's a good reason why the Department of Education should be abolished (I'd go even further and abolish local public schools, privatizing all K-12 education)
If the whole voting population came together and said we’d like to pay ourselves $100,000 in straight cash today by borrowing it from future generations. Should they be able to do it in the name of direct democracy? Blocking all future growth due to aesthetic reasons is 10x worse, atleast the $100,000 could be meaningfully spent now.
This is the exact opposite of that though. This is people coming together and saying "lets put a temporary pause on new infrastructure until the research/science catches up so we make sure we don't screw things up for future generations". It's people prioritizing long term stable and healthy growth over short term profits and hype cycles
No NIMBY ever says “let’s just ban this!”, they always say “we need to study the issue more”. Almost always.
The science of hosting rack GPU servers in the middle of is unknown? Are you listening to yourself? Power and water usage is extremely well known. This isn’t a Nuclear Fusion site.
This is exactly what I mean though, if you can just keep claiming everything is an unknown you can successfully do nothing ever. The NIMBY mantra.
Spare me with the “temporary”, nobody will ever find the political will to actually approve data centers in Maine for the next quarter century, I can guarantee it.
Who decides things if not the entire voting population? There's nothing inherently wrong with your suggestion, if it's what everyone wants. We've been doing it for a century, see the national debt. But people like their kids, so we restrain it. People don't want a society full of desperation, so we restrain it. People want a strong nation, so we restrain it. It's not a crazy hypothetical, it's how the system works. Humans just aren't basic consumption machines.
Is a data center worse than an iron smelter or aluminum refiner? The negative backlash is way out of proportion to the actual harm of a light industrial activity with minimal pollution. Put in requirements for responsible caps on electricity usage and ban "temporary" generators so they don't get a backdoor public subsidy on their power consumption. The market will sort the rest out.
> Is a data center worse than an iron smelter or aluminum refiner
It may not be worse, but it is more likely. There just aren't trillions of dollars being poured into new smelters across the country. If there were, then I imagine laws being enacted about them to.
I don't know if they're "worse" but both iron smelters and aluminum refiners are heavily regulated. It only seems logical to treat data centers the same
Data centers do not produce many jobs, and in return it will put more demand on our power grid which is one of the most expensive in the nation. Instead of building new large power consumers, we should be forcing CMP to connect up the tens of solar projects looking to contribute to our grid.
It's not like we actually hurt for a "Tech" industry. Southern Maine has a lot more "tech: jobs than you would expect for being an old as hell and poor state.
Per local job created? As bad as they are for the environment, local folks are working there, stimulating the local economy for a much longer period than specialists flying in, spinning up a DC, then leaving for the next one.
The council is commissioning studies and hiring experts. Its not like the politicians themselves need any relevant expertise. They just need to be competent at writing good legislation, structuring such institutions, and knowing how to listen to the experts they hired
Maine is far from being a nimby state, apart from the 30% expansion rule for houses <250ft from water, there is basically no zoning across the entire state and a fly by night hot dog diner could go up next to your million dollar cottage if it wanted to.
California on the other hand… but they are clearly far from becoming a “dead state”
> This is a recipe for creating dead retiree states.
This too is the beauty of federalism. You want to live in a dead retiree state? You can. You want to live in a bustling industrial district? You can too. As long as you do things through proper democratic channels.
> Now do this for housing
But this bill is not about housing. This response makes as much sense as responding to a new law legalizing marijuana and saying "now do this for heroin, rape and murder."
Is your argument that we should ignore the will of the people? Because this is what the people of Maine want. Why exactly should Maine be forced to have data centers in it when its citizens don't want that?
Maine's economy is based on tourism and rich people (which tend to be older) wanting to live (and spend their money) there. You got to consider things carefully about what you do to the states economy with eyeysores like power lines and electricity-generation to feed datacenters.
Are TX and AZ really dead retiree states…as an example of states recognized as more business friendly? I work in a heavily-per state-regulated industry. Some states have regulations that increase the cost to do business there, and so we will (1) never have offices there and (2) those states get products last if at all. I also see tons of jobs being created in TX and AZ.
Not wanting data centers and not wanting new housing are not the same thing, and conflating them is absurd and intentional dishonesty.
Sorry people aren't bending over backwards to help your AI start-up get VC funding, but maybe if y'all were a bit more honest, people wouldn't hate the infrastructure you're desperately trying to install in their backyard. Because it sure as shit isn't going in yours, is it?
I'm from Nevada, another state that people presume is all desert. (Really, it's all mountains.)
The only part of Texas I've driven is between Austin and S Antonio. It was perhaps the least-beautiful wilderness I've driven through. It really did just feel like desert and billboards - like if Walmart was a highway.
But I also presume Texas marketing itself as a less-regulated alternative (e.g. to California) is why it's easy to imagine Texas wanting infrastructure that Maine might not.
Nevada is a gem. Way too dry but incredibly beautiful with some truly unique features (ancient trees, hot springs, strange minerals, clear dark night skies). Eastern/central Texas is far less interesting.
Between Austin and San Antonio is so developed that it's considered by many to be a single "metro" area, DFW-style. There's very little not developed directly between the two.
I drove that way in 2024 for the solar eclipse. Some parts of that route struck me as a bit exurb-ish and spread-out, I wouldn't call it a single metro area, but there were definitely people living there. And it was way too green to be called a desert; I've driven through actual deserts in southern CA and nowhere that I saw in that part of Texas was anywhere near that dry (I guess you have to go further west to get to actual Texas desert, which we didn't do on that trip).
The deserts around El Paso are still quite a bit more alive than the ugliest desert I've ever seen (the stretch between Phoenix and San Diego gets that dubious honor).
Of course you already know this but for everyone else it is called the Basin and Range province. You have desert areas and then a mountain range with much higher elevation with cooler temperatures and more precipitation which means trees and forests and green in color
Okay, we'll give Nevada a participation award for "green in color". Maine wins the "green in color" category by a lot. It's orders of magnitude greener.
"Green" isn't everything though. Nevada has a lot of brown going for it!
Oh, Maine also has a tidal coastline of 3478 miles, but Nevada is landlocked. Nevada does have a couple of big lakes though.
Wallace Stegner said that to appreciate the arid west, “You have to get over the color green; you have to quit associating beauty with gardens and lawns…”
I've spent at least a hundred weekends camping in the Mojave desert over the last 30 years. There is beauty there, but a lot of the beauty is more about what's not there than what is there. And what's green really stands out. The creosote is amazing and some of it has been there thousands of years. The King Clone circle has been there 11,000 years and is still going.
That said, if I had to choose between Nevada and Maine for a getaway, I'd choose Maine.
Folks have been conditioned to consider the deserts of West Texas, especially the Permian Basin, to be wastelands with no redeeming value.
Personally, while it isn't my favorite landscape or even my favorite desert landscape, I still think it is a landscape with intrinsic value and beauty.
Yeah, sorry that wasn't intended as a slight to Texas. Texas just does have a lot of barren landscape where datacenters wouldn't offend as much. I modified it to make that clear. Also, energy is playing a role here.
I've been watching a series on YT that is specifically about rural towns in Texas that are being abandoned or on the brink of total collapse. Much of it has to do with highways and routing around these communities decades ago. I don't know if a datacenter is the answer, but it has to be better then what looks like a post apocalyptic America.
Reviving Radiator Springs with a datacenter! The plot of Cars 4.
Those small towns are often positioned such that even if you plopped a billion dollar datacenter on top of them, it wouldn't change much, as even with second and third order effects it's adding 100-200 total population.
Is that really the primary concern about datacenters? Their aesthetics? I thought the major problem with them was that they muscle in on valuable resources like water and electricity, consuming what would otherwise be used by people, and driving the prices up.
Taking up land is one of the resources they use - consider cutting down trees to clear space for a large one, or the habitats that might have been in that space. That's not really an aesthetic thing.
Guessing some used swamp coolers to save electricity on chillers, and some motivated people decided to make a big stink about it? Now everyone seems to think that DCs inherently use up tons of fresh water.
They are definitely driving up electric costs for residential customers, though (along with EVs and heat pumps) which is a major problem.
I've driven through all of Texas twice, and had to spend time in Austin and Houston for work, but never had to live there, so I'd like to think I'm informed without being biased.
Besides the heavily oak covered hill country west of Austin it's pretty much the ugliest landscape in the country. I will admit the west Texas desert is less ugly than the desert of southern Arizona/eastern California, but north/east Texas is the flattest, least interesting part of the Mississippi basin (Nebraska/Kansas/Oklahoma are similarly meh but you don't have the insane humidity).
By size there should be more. That’s why they feel that way. Maine is significantly more beautiful than Texas. The ugliest part of Maine probably still looks better than most of Texas. I can’t even think of an example of “ugly Maine”.
Because the other big expense in a datacenter: electricity. Texas has really cheap electricity compared to the rest of the country, sitting at second cheapest after North Dakota.
Long summers = tx actually has lots more Solar, but also biz friendly laws, biz friendly taxes, lots of corp HQ, cheap land, own power grid (for better or worse), cost of labor, etc.
States don't have "rights", people do. I don't support any state's power to take away any human's rights. And bootlickers who do shouldn't have the chance to act out their fascistic fantasies
It's reasonable to believe that a blanket ban on data centers constitutes a regulatory taking, and therefore run afoul of people's property rights. A data center doesn't pose some unreasonable risk to the public interest to justify this degree of action.
It’s a ban on any DC over 20 megawatts, regardless of site or situation - that’s a blanket ban because there’s no exceptions or justifications for the ban to apply to every large DC, regardless of location.
From what I can tell, case law on takings via this kind of regulation is “case by case”, without a clear test for when it crosses over the line into an unreasonable imposition on property rights.
It's a pause. And not a particularly long one either.
Maine is saying "we don't have the legal infrastructure to make sure we can build these out in a way that protects the environment and our residents so let's put a pause on building while we build up that framework"
Maine is saying "hey give us until 2027 to research this and provide a good regulatory framework for massive data centers that don't impede on human rights to clean water and air". The moratorium expires after 2027.
What human right is being violated here?
Would you also say the requirement to get a driver's license is a violation of a human right?
Some people are addicted to the taste of boots. In most of the US, small cities are being bullied around by huge tech firms that have taken over their political infrastructure and bought out their politicians. The people of Maine are sticking up to bid-rigging, bribery, and political collusion. More power to them
They're not even the first. Kentucky is facing fallout from uncovered collusion between local officials and developers (Western Hospitality Partners) to advance a data center project and they've also had to place a moratorium.
> In most of the US, small cities are being bullied around by huge tech firms that have taken over their political infrastructure and bought out their politicians.
It's emblematic of Maine's wider anti-business and anti-growth climate which may explain why the state now has the highest median age in the US and one of the lowest fertility rates of any state.
I can't tell if this is sarcasm? On the chance that it isn't, how would that make them rich? The profit from the data centers goes to the owner not to the people in the community or rest of the state.
I live in Northern VA, the world capital of data centers and can co-sign this. they bring absolutely nothing other than our electric bills have literally doubled in the last 24 or so months
> electric bills have literally doubled in the last 24 or so months
To all the dopes wondering why people hate your data center contribution craze so much this is why.
Don’t know why it needs to be spelled out so explicitly. It’s obvious to anyone with an IQ above room temp. I’ve seen it all over the country at this point. People are really made when their bills get real expensive.
The DCs are in VA because its fed / spook central, which induces a large number of well paid policy / compliance / paperwork / tech jobs etc.
NoVa literally one of the richest regions on the planet and it's all sorta tied up in the same thing. Seems unfair to say DCs "bring nothing", the whole ecosystem is a manifestation of concentrated defense spend.
makes too much sense but of course they’ll move to Texas then and you’d again be labeled (like poor Maine here) as unfriendly to businesses and god knows what else
That ignores all the tax revenue they bring in at the local level. Virginia also has tax exemptions at the state level, but as another commentator points out, data centers are delivering a huge share of tax revenue in places like Loudon County.
And of course you can (and should!) get rid of those state tax exemptions which have served their purpose.
I'm not defending Musk, but "problematic" used in this type of context is one of those words that says more about the speaker than it does the subject.
IMO it's best to use fewer thought-terminating cliches in that case, not more. Unless one is simply engaging in a Reddit-style call-and-response exercise.
To me, Musk crossed from "maverick" to "problematic" around 2018, when he tried to insert himself into the Thai cave rescue operation and ended up slinging accusations of pedophilia on Twitter.
At this point, he has unlocked many more specific adjectival achievements, and those are the ones that should be invoked whenever Musk's behavior is the topic. (Which it isn't here.)
It's a rhetorical device that dates back to the ancient Greeks (meiosis). It's absolutely a lot more writing to enumerate the ways in which Elon Musk is problematic.
In a sane world it would read that way. Unfortunately, we live in a world where such nondescript descriptors (“problematic”, “objectionable”, “unprofessional”, “toxic”, “extremist”, “far-$SIDE”, a few others depending on usage) have been used, and overused, to accuse or smear people without taking on much of a burden of proof or making any statements specific enough to be falsifiable.
They now provoke instinctive revulsion when used in culture-war-adjacent contexts even when, as here, their usage is entirely legitimate (you presuppose a vague but mutually understood allegation rather than nebulously introducing a fresh one). I think only “controversial” has escaped this fate, but it might be too weak for your purposes.
(To be clear, I am only trying to explain why your phrasing might cause your interlocutor to momentarily recoil even when—as in my case—they don’t actually have any problem with the contents of your statement. What you do with this explanation is up to you: I don’t believe these terms are short-term salvageable at this point, but neither will I begrudge others their choice of hopeless cause; I certainly have my own fair share of those.)
You are just moving the goalposts to criticize a position without being required to provide a reason. You could pick any phrase and mark it as beneath intelligent discourse. You are choosing “problematic” because you don’t like the implication.
Musk is easy to laugh at and to criticize. Problematic encompasses his lying, pettiness, racism, sexual weirdness, ego and fraud as well as anything. Regardless of the proportions of specific traits, as a whole, he’s a problematic individual. That’s perfectly cromulent.
He was always a nutcase. So unhinged he got booted out of PayPal. Then the shenanigans and retconing of him as a Tesla founder. His unrealistic promises he never realised over the years at Tesla. The pedo guy thing. The HyperLoop bullshit. It was not as obvious because he still had some filters but it was already visible if you were paying attention. Problematic is a good description of what he was.
Just because you've been programmed to associate "problematic" with "liberals" and then further trained to think that people who use the word "problematic" are in fact problems, that's on you, the larger zeitgeist you don't see, and the people programming you.
I feel like taking issue with a word, even when used in a perfectly valid situation, is something worth reflection. Like fair enough if you've heard problematic used in ways you disagree with before, but maybe respond to those comments, not one where you agree with its use. Unless you actually do mean to defend Musk and don't think lying to investors, calling people pedos for saving kids, delaying public infrastructure, doing Nazi salutes, etc. etc. is problematic.
> The success of Claude Code and Cursor at the higher end of the market shows that even the people pickiest about their software (developers) will use your software regardless of how good the code is.
Seems wrong. Devs will whine, moan and nitpick about even free software but they can understand failure modes, navigate around bugs and file issues on GitHub. The quality bar is 10-100x amongst non-techno-savvy folks and enterprise users that are paying for your software. They’re far more “picky”.
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