I 100% agree with the author here. Most of the "LLMs are slowing me down/are trash/etc" discussions I've had at work usually come from people who are not great developers to begin with - they end up tangled into a net of barely vetted code that was generated for them.
I also like how it uses git, and it’s good at using less context (tool calling eats context like crazy!)
This might be your anecdotal experience but in mine, reviewing large diffs of (unvetted agent-written) code is usually not much faster than writing it yourself (especially when you have some mileage in the codebase), nor does it offset the mental burden of thinking how things interconnect and what the side effects might be.
What IMO moves the needle towards slower is that you have to steer the robot (often back and forth to keep it from undoing its own previous changes). You can say it's bad prompting but there's no guarantee that a certain prompt will yield the desired results.
EDIT: It shows the side-by-side view by default, but it is easy to toggle to a unified view. There's probably a way to permanently set this somewhere.
This seems to be something both sides of the debate agree on: Their opponents are wrong because they are subpar developers.
It seems uncharitable to me in both cases, and of course it is a textbook example of an ad hominem fallacy.
Claude Code does this, you just have to not click “Yes and accept all changes”
Can't wait until we have useful heuristics for comparing LLM's. This is a problem that comes up constantly (especially in HN comments...)
Agree
> and AI Studio is the only serious product for human-in-the-loop SWE
Disagree. I use Claude Code and Codex daily, and I couldn’t be happier. Had started with Cursor, switched to CLI based agents and never looked back. I use WezTerm, tmux, neovim, Zoxide, and create several tabs and panes and run claude code not only for vibe coding, scripting, analysing files, letting it write concepts, texts, documentation. Totally different kind of computing experience. As if I have several assistants 24/7 at my fingertips.
I was always hesitant to jump into the vibe coding buzz.
A month ago I tried Codex w/ CLI agents and they now take care of all the menial tasks I used to hate that come w/ coding.
My last use case was like this : I had a old codebase code that was using bakbone.js for ui with jquery and a bunch of old js with little documentation to generat UI for a clojure web application.
Gemini was able to unravel this hairball of code and guiding me step by step to htmx. I am not using AI studio; I am using Gemini subscription.
Since I manually patch the code, its like pair programming with an incredibly patient and smart programmer.
For the record, I am too old for vibe coding .. I like to maintain total control over my code and all the abstractions and logic.
AI studio is just another IDE like cursor so its a very odd choice to say one is bad and the other is the holy grail:)
But I guess this is what guerilla advertising is these days.
Just another random account with 8 karma points that just happens to post an article about how one IDE is bad and its almost identical cousin is the bestGoogle does tend to have large contexts and sometimes reasonable prices for it. So if one of the main takeaway is load everything into context then I can certainly understand why author is a fan
OP is actually advocating against Google's latest products here. Surely a submarine would hype Antigravity and Gemini 3 Pro instead?
This has made a big difference my side. prompt.md that is mostly very natural language markdown. Then ask LLM to turn that into a plan.md that contains phases emphasising that each should be fairly selfcontained. This usually needs some editing but is mostly fine. And then just have it implement each phase one by one.
There are literally hundreds of engineering improvements that we will see along the way like a intelligent replacement to compacting to deal with diff explosion, more raw memory availability and dedicated inference hardware, models that can actually handle >1M context windows without attention loss, and so on.
tcdent•37m ago
And then goes on to recommend AI Studio is a primary dev tool?! Baffling.
esafak•30m ago
> Second, and no less important, AI Studio is genuinely the best chat interface on the market. It was the first platform where you could edit any message in the conversation, not just the last one, and I think it's still the only platform where you can edit AI responses as well! So if the model goes on an unnecessary tangent, you can just remove it from the context. It's still the only platform where if you have a long conversation like R(equest)1, O(utput)1, R2, O2, R3, O3, R4, O4, R5, O5, you can click regenerate on R3 and it will only regenerate O3, keeping R4 and all subsequent messages intact.
NitpickLawyer•22m ago
What's a use case for this? I'm trying to imagine why you'd want that, but I can't see it. Is it for the horny people? If you're trying to do anything useful, having messages edited should re-generate the following conversation as well (tool calls, etc).
badsectoracula•2m ago
And yeah it can be useful for coding since you can edit the LLM's response to fix mistakes (and add minor features/tweaks to the code) and pretend it was correct from the get go instead of trying to roleplay with someone who makes mistakes you then have to correct :-P
hoppp•26m ago
margalabargala•21m ago