You can't, at least for production code. I have used Claude Code for vibe coding several side projects now, some just for fun, others more serious and need to be well written and maintainable. For the former, as long as it works, I don't care, but I could easily see issues like dependency management. Then for the latter, because I actually need to personally verify every detail of the final product and review (which means "scan" at the least) the code, I always see a lot of issues -- tightly coupled code that makes testing difficult, missing test cases, using regex when it shouldn't, having giant classes that are impossible to read/maintain. Well, many of the issues you see humans do. I needed to constantly interrupt and ask it to do something different.
> You can't, at least for production code.
You can. People do. It's not perfect at it yet, but there are success stories of this.
Are you talking about the same thing as the OP?
I mean, the parent even pointed out that it works for vibe coding and stuff you don't care about; ...but the 'You can't' refers to this question by the OP:
> I really need to approve every single edit and keep an eye on it at ALL TIMES, otherwise it goes haywire very very fast! How are people using auto-edits and these kind of higher-level abstraction?
No one I've spoken to is just sitting back writing tickets while agents do all the work. If it was that easy to be that successful, everyone would be doing it. Everyone would be talking about it.
To be absolutely clear, I'm not saying that you can't use agents to modify existing code. You can. I do; lots of people do. ...but that's using it like you see in all the demos and videos; at a code level, in an editor, while editing and working on the code yourself.
I'm specifically addressing the OPs question:
Can you use unsupervised agents, where you don't interact at a 'code' level, only at a high level abstraction level?
...and, I don't think you can. I don't believe anyone is doing this. I don't believe I've seen any real stories of people doing this successfully.
> Can you use unsupervised agents, where you don't interact at a 'code' level, only at a high level abstraction level?
My view, after having gone all-in with Claude Code (almost only Opus) for the last four weeks, is ”no”. You really can’t. The review process needs to be diligent and all-encompassing and is, quite frankly, exhausting.
One improvement I have made to my process for this is to spin up a new Claude Code instance (or clear context) and ask for a code review based on the diff of all changes. My prompt for this is carefully structured. Some issues it identifies can be fixed with the agent, but others need my involvement. It doesn’t eliminate the need to review everything, but it does help focus some of my efforts.
Do you know of any links to writeups (or just mentions) of this?
Check out the_mitsuhiko’s youtube, he has been showing some good techniques in the past few weeks.
I don't trust Armin for that, he's too good a developer for vibe coding. The question is whether someone who can't program at all can make something that works well with LLMs, not whether Armin can.
Is that the question? I definitely don't think that's remotely reasonable for someone who can't program. For small things yes, but large things? They're going to get into a spin cycle with the LLM on some edge case it's confused about where they consistently say "the button is blue!" and the bot confirms it is indeed not blue.
It really depends on the area though. Some areas are simple for LLMs, others are quite difficult even if objectively simple.
Granted atm i'm not a big believer in vibe coding in general, but imo it requires quite a bit of knowledge to be hands off and not have it fall into wells of confusion.
That's what I understood from the top-level question, and it's my experience as well. If you don't review the LLM's code, it breaks very quickly. That's why the question for me isn't "how many agents can I run in parallel?", but "how many changes can I review in parallel?".
For me, that's "just one", and that's why LLM coding doesn't scale very far for me with these tools.
if you have to understand the code, it's not vibe coding. Karpathy's whole tweet was about ignoring the code.
if you have to understand the code to progress, it's regular fucking programming.
I don't go gushy about code generation when I use yasnippet or a vim macro, why should super autocomplete be different?
this is an important distinction because if Karpathy's version becomes real we're all out of a job, and I'm sick of hearing developers role play publicly towards leaders that their skills aren't valuable anymore
I disagree, i think there's degrees of governance that these concepts cover. It's all subjective of course. For me though, i've "vibe coded" projects (as testing grounds) with minimal review, but still used my programming experience to shape the general architecture and testing practices to what i thought would best fit the LLM.
The question is how much do you review, and how much does your experience help it? Even if you didn't know code you're still going to review the app. Ideally incrementally or else you won't know what's working and what isn't. Reviewing the technical "decisions" from the LLM is just an incremental step towards reviewing every LOC. There's a large gulf between full reviews and no reviews.
Where in that gulf you decide to call it "vibe coding" is up to you. If you only consider it vibing if you never look at the code though, then most people don't vibe code imo.
I think of "vibe coding" as synonymous with "sloppy/lazy coding". Eg you're skipping details and "trusting" that the LLM is either correct or has enough guardrails to be correct in the impl. How many details you skip though is variable, imo.
> The question is whether someone who can't program at all can make something that works well with LLMs
Is that where the goalposts are now?
No, this is where this discussion is, since the top comment. Please go elsewhere for straw men.
No one mentioned anything about "people who can't program at all" until your comment. Up until then the discussion was about using LLMs for production ready code. It's a given that people working on production systems know how to program.
That is what "auto-edits" (in the first comment) and "vibe coding" (in the second comment) mean.
There are few writeups but if you go to agentic coding meetups you can find people that show the stuff the build. It’s really quite impressive.
Do they go into the architecture and code structure, or more just the user-facing result? Coding agents do a lot of copy-paste or near equivalents and make way too much code to accomplish many things.
Ah, we don't have any such meetups where I am... Are these from people who can't program at all?
Also, yes. I wrote about this a bit here: https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2025/7/20/the-next-generation/
There are a lot of people who are entering programming via this thing.
Sure, but when I tried to vibe code something in a language I didn't have experience with, and so didn't look at the code at all, I had to basically trash the codebase after a few hundred lines because nothing I'd say could make the LLM fix the problems, or if it fixed them, more problems would pop up elsewhere.
In my experience, if you can't review the code and point out the LLM's mistakes to it, the codebase gets brittle fast. Maybe other people are better vibe coders than me, but I never managed to solve that problem, not even with Opus 4.1.