I built a validator that passed every broken skill and failed every good one

August Kingston — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 22:39:53 +0000

Honestly, the most humbling thing about building… is the gap between the vision in your head and the potholes you don't see coming.

I had this whole picture of where I wanted my skills to go. Clean, production grade, the kind of thing another builder could actually lean on. I would get to a point where I feel good about it, and then something small and dumb would break and send me right back to the start.

The one that got me the worst was my skill validator. Its entire job is to check other skills and tell you what's broken and what's fine. I thought I had it working. Felt good about it. Sent it over to some folks I build with so they could try it on their own stuff.

They came back and told me it wasn't working. So they got deliberate about it. They took skills they knew were broken, fed them in on purpose, and watched the validator hand them a clean bill of health. Garbage in, thumbs up.

Turned out the whole thing was running backwards. It was a logic check reading its own verdict inverted. Broken skills came out tagged as good, and the good ones came out tagged as broken. The one tool whose entire reason to exist is catching problems, and it was confidently wrong in both directions at once.

The worst part is it looked like it was working the whole time, because it always gave you an answer. It just gave you the opposite one.

Took me about two days to actually chase it down and fix it. Not a heroic fix. Just sitting with it, running known-broken and known-good skills through over and over until I could see exactly where the pass and the fail were getting swapped.

Here's what I learned. I knew when I was building it that it was never gonna be shiny. It doesn't do quant level math, it's not gonna make anybody rich, it's not the skill that looks amazing in a screenshot. It checks the small boring stuff.

The boring skill failing taught me more than any of the flashy ideas I'd sketched out, because it showed me the difference between a tool that looks done and a tool that actually does the job.

But that's where it counts, right? It's the small, boring as hell, monotonous, tedious work that compounds and puts what you've built on the map. The small real thing, done right, that someone can trust. A validator that actually validates. The boring one is the one people keep using after the shiny one gets deleted.

The ones who actually get somewhere just don't quit on the boring part. It's small steps, and when the step's wrong they pivot and take another one. That's the whole thing. It's not much of a secret.

So if you're building something right now, one question. Does it just look impressive, or does it actually fix a small real thing for someone? Because the second one is harder, and it's the one that lasts.

Even if the only people who catch the bug are a couple of friends telling you your validator's broken.

Who actually gets to build?

August Kingston — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 00:21:03 +0000

I keep seeing this same tension play out everywhere. TikTok, Instagram, X, all over the tech corners of the internet. It's the fight between software engineers and vibe coders, and tbh, I get both sides of it.

Let me take the engineers' side first, because they're not wrong. If you spent four plus years learning to actually code, grinding the fundamentals, learning why the thing works and not just that it works, then yeah, I understand the frustration. Someone opens up Claude or ChatGPT, writes a prompt, ships their first app, and calls themselves a software engineer. And half the time, the second they hit a real problem, the whole thing falls over, because they don't actually know what's under the hood. I'd be a little annoyed too.

And real talk, nothing replaces that depth. An engineer who can reach into the code, read it, and understand exactly what every line is doing is on a different level than someone vibe coding their way through. That's just true.

But here's the part that sits weird with me.

The problem isn't people using AI to build. It's when it turns into a wall. When the message becomes "you're not allowed in here, you don't get to build the thing in your head, because you didn't earn it the right way." That's the part I don't buy.

I've watched this play out with my own friends. Engineers on one side, the ones just getting into vibe coding on the other, and there's this real contention between them. Almost a running joke about who counts and who doesn't.

I think big ideas come first. The imagination comes first. Then you go find the resources, or the people, or the tools to actually build it. If someone has a huge idea and AI is the thing that finally lets them build it without waiting for permission, I don't see a problem. I see someone building.

Gatekeeping who gets to make things never made much sense to me. You can respect the craft and still leave the door open. Those two aren't in conflict. Just my take.

DEV Community: August Kingston

I built a validator that passed every broken skill and failed every good one

Who actually gets to build?