alt Hacker NewsI’ve had a similar experience. I’ve been vibecoding a personal kanban app for myself. Claude practically one-shotted 90% of the core functionality (create boards, lanes, cards, etc.) in a single session. But after that I’ve now spent close to 30 hours planning and iterating on the remaining features and UI/UX tweaks to make the app actually work for me, and still, it doesn’t feel "ready" yet. That’s not to say it hasn’t sped up the process considerably; it would’ve taken me hours to achieve what Claude did in the first 10 minutes.
I've got a few projects I've generated, along with a wholly handwritten project started in Dec.
The difference I've noticed is that the act of actually typing out code made me backtrack a few times refining the possible solutions before even starting the integration tests, sometimes before even doing a compile.
When generating, the LLM never backtracked, even in the face of broken tests. It would proceed to continue band-aiding until everything passed. It would add special exceptions to general code instead of determining that the general rule should be refined or changed.
The reason that some devs are reporting 10x productivity is because a bunch of duct-taped, band-aided, instant-legacy code is acceptable. Others who dont see that level of productivity increase are spending time fixing the code to be something they can read.
Not sure yet if accepting the spaghetti is the right course. If future LLMs can understand this spaghetti then theres no point in good code. If we still need human coders, then the productivity increase is very small.