[nickorlow]

I've found that the effort required to get a good outcome is roughly equal to the effort of doing it myself.

If I do it myself, I get the added bonus of actually understanding what the code is doing, which makes debugging any issues down the line way easier. It's also in generally better for teams b/c you can ask the 'owner' of a part of the codebase what their intuition is on an issue (trying to have AI fill in for this purpose has been underwhelming for me so far).

Trying to maintain a vibecoded codebase essentially involves spelunking though a non-familliar codebase every time manual action is needed to fix an issue (including reviewing/verifying the output of an AI tool's fix for the issue).

(For small/pinpointed things, it has been very good. e.g.: write a python script to comb through this CSV and print x details about it/turn this into a dashboard)

[wahnfrieden]

I didn’t say essentially all software is vibe coded. You already agree with me that it’s very good at some range of common tasks.

[thway15269037]

There are other things very good "at some range of common tasks". For example, stackoverflow snippets, libraries, bash spaghetti and even some no-code/low-code tools.

[wahnfrieden]

ok

[aspenmartin]

In sonnet 4 and even 4.5 I would have said you are absolutely right, and in many cases it slows you down especially when you don’t know enough to sniff trouble.

Opus 4.5 and 4.6 is where those instances have gone down, waaay down (though still true). Two personal projects I had abandoned after sonnet built a large pile of semi working cruft it couldn’t quite reason about, opus 4.6 does it in almost one shot.

You are right about learning but consider: you can educate yourself along the way — in some cases it’s no substitute for writing the code yourself, and in many cases you learn a ton more because it’s an excellent teacher and you can try out ideas to see which work best or get feedback on them. I feel I have learned a TON about the space though unlike when I code it myself I may not be extremely comfortable with the details. I would argue we are about 30% of the way to the point where it’s not even no longer relevant it’s a disservice to your company to be writing things yourself.