> written code is no longer a time sink
It still is, and should be. It’s highly unlikely that you provided all the required info to the agent at first try. The only way to fix that is to read and understand the code thoroughly and suspiciously, and reshaping it until we’re sure it reflects the requirements as we understand them.
Vibe coding is not telling an agent what to do and checking back. It's an active engagement and best results are achieved when everything is planned and laid out in advance — which can also be done via vibe coding.
No, written code is no longer a time sink. Vibe coding is >90% building without writing any code.
The written code and actions are literally presented in diffs as they are applied, if one so chooses.
> It's an active engagement and best results are achieved when everything is planned and laid out in advance
The most efficient way to communicate these plans is in code. English is horrible in comparison.
When you’re using an agent and not reviewing every line of code, you’re offloading thinking to the AI. Which is fine in some scenarios, but often not what people would call high quality software.
Writing code was never the slow part for a competent dev. Agent swarming etc is mostly snake oil by those who profit off LLMs.
ime this is the problem. When I have to deeply understand what an llm created, I don't see much of a speed improvement vs writing it myself.
With an engineer you can hand off work and trust that it works, whereas I find code reviewing llm output something that I have to treat as hostile. It will comment out auth or delete failing tests.
> When I have to deeply understand what an llm created
Which should be always in my opinion
Are people really pushing code to production that they don't understand?
They are, because in fairness in a lot of cases it just doesn't matter. It's some website to get clicks for ads and as long as you can vibe use it it's good enough to vibe code it.
I wouldn't be caught dead building garbage like that
> It's an active engagement and best results are achieved when everything is planned and laid out in advance — which can also be done via vibe coding.
No.
The general assumed definition of vibe coding, hence the vibe word, is that coding becomes an iterative process guided by intuition rather than spec and processes.
What you describe is literally the opposite of vibe coding, it feels the term is being warped into "coding with an LLM".
I've described an iterative process where one never needs to touch code or documents directly.
Leaving out specs and documentation leads to more slop and hallucinations, especially with smaller models.
How could you possibly plan out "everything" in advance? Code itself would be the only way to explicitly specify the "everything".
Have a documentation system in place and have the LLM plan the high level before having the LLM write any code.
You can always just wing it, but if you do so and there isn't adequate existing context you're going to struggle with slop and hallucinations more frequently.