Vibe coding large projects isn’t feasible yet, but as a developer here’s how I use AI to great effect, to the point where losing the tool greatly decreases my productivity:

- Autocomplete in Cursor. People think of AI agents first when they talk about AI coding but LLM-powered autocomplete is a huge productivity boost. It merges seamlessly with your existing workflow, prompting is just writings comments, it can edit multiple lines at once or redirect you to the appropriate part of the codebase, and if the output isn’t what you need you don’t waste much time because you can just choose to ignore it and write code as you usually do.

- Generating coding examples from documentation. Hallucination is basically a non-problem with Gemini Pro 2.5 especially if you give it the right context. This gets me up to speed on a new library or framework very quickly. Basically a stack overflow replacement.

- Debugging. Not always guaranteed to work, but when I’m stuck at a problem for too long, it can provide a solution, or give me a fresh new perspective.

- Self contained scripts. It’s ideal for this, like making package installers, cmake configurations, data processing, serverless micro services, etc.

- Understanding and brainstorming new solutions.

- Vibe coding parts of the codebase that don’t need deep integration. E.g. create a web component with X and Y feature, a C++ function that does a well defined purpose, or a simple file browser. I do wonder if a functional programming paradigm would be better when working with LLMs since by avoiding side effects you can work around their weaknesses when it comes to large codebases.