Kowloon Walled City reached 3.2 million people per square mile by the late 1980s, built floor by floor with no permits, no architects, and no shared plan. When demolition crews arrived in March 1993, they found layers of undocumented additions stacked on top of problems that were never solved, only buried. The article uses this as a precise structural metaphor for how software is being built right now, specifically the vibe coding movement, which the author argues is a regression to 1987-era engineer-led development with faster tools and lower floors.
The historical argument here is worth reading in full because it is specific. Pre-1990s software was designed by engineers not because engineers were best qualified, but because no one else was in the room. Error messages were written for the programmer debugging the code. Menus reflected directory trees, not human cognition. The product manager role emerged in the late 1980s precisely to break that monoculture. The piece traces how that discipline was built, why it mattered, and what gets lost when it is bypassed, whether by a solo developer in 1991 or a founder vibing a product into existence in 2025.
The real payload of this piece is not the Kowloon analogy. It is the argument that AI tools are collapsing the distance between intention and execution so fast that the questions nobody asked in Kowloon, what should this be, who is it for, what happens when it needs to change, are being skipped again at scale. The wiring metaphor is not decorative. Every cable run over a dead cable was a decision that made the next decision harder. The article asks whether that pattern is now shipping to production.
[READ ORIGINAL →]