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Reviewing 100% of generated code is undoubtedly good software engineering practice, but its not vibe coding, at least by my definition. I vibe coded a tool this week and my process was an iterative process of the prompting an LLM agent to implement small bits of functionality, the me checking the resultant output by hand (the output of the program, not the outputted code). There were shockingly few problems with this process, but when they did arise, I fixed them through a combination of reviewing the relevant code myself, reviewing log files, and additional prompting. I dont think I actually wrote or fixed a single line of code by hand, and I definitely haven't read 100% of it. Once the project was feature complete, I used more or less the same process to refactor a number of things to implement improvements, simplifications, and optimizations. Including a linter in my automated commit workflow also found a couple minor problems during refactoring such as unused imports that were trivial for the agent to fix. Is the code perfect, bug free, and able to handle every imaginable edge case without issue? Almost certainly not, but it works well enough for our use already and is providing real labor savings. But, its not documented very well, nor are any tests written yet. It might or might not be long term maintainable in its current state, but I certainly wouldn't be comfortable trying to sell or support it (we are not a software company and I am not a software developer). I should note that while I have been very impressed with my use of agentic coding tools, I am skeptical that they scale well above small projects. The tool we built this week is a bit over 2000 lines of code. I am not nearly skilled enough to work on a large codebase but I suspect this vibe coding style of programming would not work well for larger projects. |