I’ve always thought the best metaphor for a large codebase is a city. In a codebase, there are literal pipelines — data pipelines, event queues, and message brokers — and traffic flows that require complex routing. Just as cities are divided into districts because no single person or team can manage all the complexity, so too are systems divided into units such as modules or microservices.
Some parts are so old that it’s safer not to touch them, lest you blow something up — much like the unexploded bombs still buried beneath European cities. (Three World War II-era bombs were defused in Cologne, Germany, just this summer.)
If developing a new product feature is like opening a new airline lounge, a more involved project is like building a second terminal. In that sense, building an app through vibe-coding is like opening a pop-up store in the concourse — the point being that it’s self-contained and requires no integration.
Vibe-coding is good enough for a standalone program, but the knottiest problems in software engineering aren’t about building individual units but connecting them to interoperate. It’s one thing to renovate a single apartment unit and another to link a fire suppression system and emergency power across all floors so they activate in the right sequence.
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