This resonates with my experience.
I have several Open Source projects and wanted to refactor them for a decade. A week ago I sat down with Google Gemini and completely refactored three of my libraries. It has been an amazing experience.
What’s a game changer for me is the feedback loop. I can quickly validate or invalidate ideas, and land at an API I would enjoy to use.
Did you already have good integration tests?
I had, yes. But those had also been rewritten with Gemini from ground up, because it caught way more edge cases, than I did. Which is fascinating and frightening at the same time.
I think my vibe-coding success also has to do with the problem being not that “novel” and prior art exists.
Nevertheless still impressive.