Posted on September 9, 2026 by Doron Grinstein, CEO of Control Plane "A sales guy writing code" used to be the lead-up to a joke. But now no one's laughing. Designers used to sit meekly waiting for the high priests of code to make their designs real. Now they don't wait for anyone. The tools behind this shift (Cursor, Claude, Lovable, Replit) were unknown names a few years ago; now they count their users in the millions, and a meaningful share of those users have never written a line of code by hand… and never will. A lot of what gets built is toys.
Playing with toys is how people learn, and basic hosting is all a toy needs. But they aren't all toys. A lot of the products vibe-coded into existence have real potential, and their creators have real ambition and real skill. They don't understand what's happening under the hood, but they understand what the market needs and what might fix it. If they could ever get to production. What they will do is go live on some sort of infrastructure, with some sort of database, and a few rudimentary nods to good architecture: one region, one credential that can do everything, a schema nobody reviewed.
By and large, vibe-coded apps bypass the last 20 years of cloud native best practices and suffer the consequences. Apps get built at 100 miles per hour, get deployed at 85, and screech to a halt at anything resembling production. I believe closing this velocity gap is the defining infrastructure problem of the next few years, and the engineers working in cloud native infrastructure can either help or hinder. There is an old joke that the first 90 percent of a project takes 90 percent of the time, and the last 10 percent takes the other 90 percent. Software has always worked this way.
Everyone knows how to start an app; the rare skill is finishing one and getting it into the world. AI did not change that ratio. When starting an app costs real money and real engineers, the projects that died before production at least died as line items someone had approved. Now starting is nearly free, so vastly more gets started, and the fraction that finishes has fallen accordingly. If 80% of apps never shipped before, today's number is probably a lot closer to 99%. Getting to production stops being 80 percent of the work and becomes nearly all of it. But what exactly do we mean by "pro