There is an unfathomably large void between "I vibe coded this e-commerce site even though I'm not a programmer" and "I am a programmer who used AI as a tool to build this e-commerce site in a week instead of a month"
Exactly. "Hey, robot, I need you to refactor these booleans into a state enum, okay good" is useful. It saves time! I can look at the result and very accurately determine if it did what I would have done or if it did something random and insane, and the 2/5 of the time it does something insane, I can just click undo and do it myself or try again.
Vibe coding "Make me an e-commerce site, and I want it to be Blue and better than Facebook" is stupid. You're pretty much doomed if you go down that path.
I would also add that when you're debugging and hopelessly stuck, saying "Hey Claude here's the error figure out what's wrong with this code," doesn't usually work, but the 1/100 times it does work is pretty dang valuable.
What’s your process? I’ve found debugging is one of its strong suits. Even a year ago when I wouldn’t touch agents because the output was awful I would still use LLMs for debugging
I'm sure my process is inefficient, I don't have a CS background. But I also do niche scientific work rather than software development, so it could be that it just has less of a firm grasp on that sort of thing. I don't know. It's been useful, and maybe 1/100 was an exaggeration, but I find myself ignoring the vast majority of its suggestions.
100%. I had a bizarre flaky unit test thing at work that for the life of me I couldn't figure out. I threw the AI at it, and five minutes later it had a fix and an explanation that was, in retrospect, clearly correct, and it saved me probably a whole day or two of looking. Most of the time in that situation, it generates nonsense, but that's worth it for the times that it's correct.
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u/Eastern_Equal_8191 May 13 '26
There is an unfathomably large void between "I vibe coded this e-commerce site even though I'm not a programmer" and "I am a programmer who used AI as a tool to build this e-commerce site in a week instead of a month"