I see a large emphasis placed on headless agentic/vibe coding, what I don't see people talking about is how great guided coding is.
I have over a 15 YoE writing software and guided coding sessions - that is, using an editor like Zed or VSCode with an LLM integrated, writing code how you normally would but using a flash model to prompt away the annoying parts and/or plan - is as productive as vibe coding, produces significantly higher quality, is actually enjoyable, and you actually stay sharp.
Flash models (DeepSeek v4 flash) tend to be so fast that you don't have time for parallel agents, you lock in and rapid fire prompts, building high quality software while incrementally reviewing it as you go. VETO bad edits and try again or rewrite them manually.
By contrast, I have noticed headless agentic coding tends to be an unreviewable black box. The major issues I've found is that, even with a human-in-the-loop, you accumulate defects which compound and eventually you're spending millions of tokens to make trivial changes in a ridgid codebase.
Ultimately, tiny, highly cached, fast models like Qwen's 27b/a3b range or DeepSeek flash are highly capable and relatively inexpensive to run. Hoping people realise we don't need 14 trillion parameter models and I'll be able to buy some ram for my workstation
This is EXACTLY how I am working with these tools, you summarized everything about why I use this approach perfectly. Zed + OpenCode + Mimo/GLM/Kimi models are incredible. I haven't touched a "frontier model" for months.
I really treat them as "delegation layer". They're systems that sit right alongside your stack, and at this point, at every level in it, like a connective tissue that intersects at all points. I can delegate a spec, a function, a file, a whole feature set, an app, a debugging loop, etc.. My day-to-day isn't all that different, it's just like having the "Ship's Computer" that I can ping anytime I need something. I'm enjoying the benefits that a smart data processing pattern interpolator provides, but I'm not giving up any personal control or agency. My goal isn't to go faster, nor is it to avoid coding, because coding isn't drudgery or below us just because we have new code generation tools.
Agreed. I think VS Code + Codex or similar is great, personally. I never (1) hit any kind of limits with the $20 plan or (2) lose control of the code base whatsoever. I'm also not shipping at 300x or whatever some other folks claim.
I've gotten immense benefit from "guided coding". I've learned a lot, and it's saved me a lot of time digging through documentation. I also don't have anyone dictating to me how many tokens I should be burning, and I'm not forced to review my co-worker's 3000 line PR.
I agree with your last statement. Frontier models are nonsense. We should be concentrating on focused models that are cheap to run, and don't require destroying the SBC industry, and making my hobbies financially out of reach.