You're describing the modern edition of people obsessed with their "development" environments. The ones who treated their system (usually Linux) and text editor (usually Vim or Emacs) like a canvas, perfecting their configuration the way an artist refines a masterwork. Choosing packages and themes like a painter choosing brushes. Younger people of this mindset are now obsessed with multiple LLMs, multi-agent workflows, MCPs, and similar.
In contrast, there's the modern version of the people who used to just open an IDE and copy-paste snippets until they got the result they wanted. Now, those same people simply open Claude Code and prompt: "make me this app", "modify this", "do this more like that", and so on. Those are vibe coders. The only thing that's changed is a lower barrier, less effort, and faster development; yet somehow higher quality since SOTA LLMs output better code than most juniors used to.
And last there's the midway. People who set up their environment, without it becoming the main focus.
I review every single AI edit with the same cognitive load as if I was programming myself (Claude Code Opus 4.5) and I'm always having to adjust and fix things on a constant basis.
I keep doing it because having the LLM output is basically like a giant auto complete I can tweak, I can't compete with the speed of a proposed patch of me hand writing everything even if I'm considered 'fast' at a 90 WPM and using vim keybindings.
There has never been once a single session or non-trivial task where I would have to NOT intervene in the implementation and I consider myself a quite strong power user, (Master's in AI) using it for a long time, strong linting, and demanding test coverage.
It boggles me and I stand in disbelief with people saying they just let it run by itself and works (fulfilling all edge cases needed for production code NOT the happy path in a PoC) , has not been my experience at all.
I predict the following 3 things:
1.) The people using autonomous agents don't deploy any of the vibe coded mess in a high stakes production environment where bugs and crashes and unintended behaviours will make you lose money and reputation.
2) The people churning 20 agents non stop don't have the skill to realize the slop and mishaps of the code they are pushing.
3) These people have far better prompting skills and stronger setups than me and they can achieve better and more reliable results.
I don't know what it is, probably the third, but it has not matched my reality at all.
To me the limiting factor is, for lack of a better expression, the speed of taking responsibility for the agents' output.
I can't sign off a 1000 LoC change in 5 minutes, it's just not possible.
For this reason I don't believe people saying they've experienced a 20x speedup. No one who makes a living in this business is this much slower at writing than reading code that they don't hit a wall with the latter when the former is done by AI.
godzillabrennus•1h ago
dham•1h ago