That is the mantra of today, yes. In a similar vein, I made my initially personal C course into something I could make public-facing, with some refinements, I also kept adding features but them my "sanity"(?) kicked in and i squashed a couple to be only in dev mode. Perhaps they will return to the public version after a round of refinement.
I first programmed in C on a PDP 11 many years ago. I'm curious what you mean by "public vs. dev mode"?
Currently working in a place where I actually need to talk to people and do real life stuff: a store clerk. Not glamorous, but it allows me, in my own time, to tinker with the things i know, learn new things, and more recently, vibe-code stuff and release at a pace I've never worked before.
What i meant by the "public vs dev mode" is: i gated a feature or two behind only being present if im running my app locally (via npm run dev or what have you), because i was insatisfied with how that feature is currently implemented. I intend to refine it at a later point.
I did that because, even in the age of thinking "in terms of features rather than implementation", i am trying to be selective, and find a headspace where, if i feel that a certain aspect of a project (be it fully/partially vibe coded or not) is not ready to be presented in the live app, then it does not need to / should not be in prod. Could be that i was aiming too high and the feature was lacking, coule be my prompts that were misguided, or could be feature creep making me nervous.
I both welcome and fear the age where tokens get vastly expensive. I also hope for the time where we can run proper local models that don't require me to live in a data center.
Sorry for the long comment. It's my own writing at least. "if i had more time, i'd have written a shorter letter"