FWIW "vibe coding" is a term invented by Andrej Karpathy in a tweet in February of this year, describing his own personal coding workflow. I don't think Cursor has tried to promise automating every aspect of software development hands-free.

My experience mirrors yours in the sense that most coding agents are very fast, but quite junior, engineers who sometimes struggle to fix their own bugs. Nonetheless there is an advantage to speed, and if you're working on a problem a junior engineer could solve, at this point why bother doing it yourself? One of the coding agents (I prefer Claude Code personally since it's a terminal-based tool, but Cursor is similar) can write out the code faster than I can. If it adds a bug, I can usually fix it quite quickly anyway; after all, I'm not using it for the more complex problems.

Where they are today though, I wouldn't use them for hard problems, e.g. dealing with race conditions in complex codebases. For simpler webdev tasks though they're pretty useful: it's been a long time since I've hand-written an admin dashboard, for example.

Mind sharing your admin dashboard workflow?

It's pretty simple. I write out a detailed spec, similar to what I'd put in Linear/JIRA for a bright intern. I give it to Claude Code, and it starts writing code, proposing the edits to me. They're usually decent, and when they aren't I reject the proposed edits and give it feedback. After a few minutes the work is done, typically faster than I could've typed out the code by hand (even including writing the spec).

God help you for complex code though, it will spin in circles of failing to debug.