The people struggling with this most are also the ones that never got to grips with human delegation either.

At least in my circle it's the classic leads/seniors (that predate the scrum "everyone's the same" thing) that are managing to get the most real mileage out of this.

> I've never been more informed or understood more about my code, pipelines, and stack than now...

Would you mind clarifying if this includes code, pipelines, stacks, etc... on which many other people are simultaneously working on in a group setting? Or are these all things that you alone are working on as an individual?

My experience has been that AI makes me tremendously more productive as an individual working alone. Put 20 people (all empowered by AI) on a project however, and it quickly falls to shit.

> You don't _have_ to turn you brain off when coding with an LLM. It's not some intelligence dementor. If your brain turned off while you were vibe coding

You have too, because that's the definition of vibe coding. If you use an LLM to assist you, but still keep your brain on, that's not vibe coding.

You're technically right on your first point, but I think this is missing a broader issue... this entire technology incentivises its users to put as little effort (and cognitive effort, at that -- so, thought) as possible to go from a vague idea of something they want to a somewhat-working thing. That's how it's being sold, that's how it's being marketed, and that's how it's arguably being built from an interface point-of-view.

Is it possible to use it in a more involved way? Certainly. I try to do that. But it's challenging, because ultimately even taking a more collaborative approach, this thing puts out a lot of slop, and then I have to deal with going over the output and just spending most of my day in code review mode vs an author that doesn't ever learn from feedback.

The most frustrating thing for me beyond the feedback black hole is that when things do inevitably go wrong, trying to point out the concrete issue and instructing the LLM to do better around it is challenging; a lot of the time directives (even those in a global CLAUDE.md!) are just ignored either outright or as the context grows, or fail to be passed down to subagents; negative prompts are discouraged because of the pink elephant effect, so I have to jump through hoops to try and frame a "never do $thing" constraint as an affirmative prompt (which is then often ignored). That aside, english is a godawful language for specifying things compared to programming languages. It's just a really frustrating experience overall.

So like I get what you're saying but an LLM helping you code is just a personal search engine/autocomplete.

"Vibe coding" to me and others is just going "claude program me a wife that didn't leave with the kids and make no mistakes" and just rawdogging the output.

but that's just me.

I never said you have to turn your brain off to feel the limitations.

Actually, for more complex work I think it's pretty common to spend a long time crafting some elaborate prompt, and then arguing with the agent for 10-20 turns, getting a "passable" plan, accepting it then arguing with the agent every step of the way because it's doing it wrong. It's incredibly frustrating, even with models like Fable.

Even after that, I'll often find out during later sessions that some feature that was supposed to be deprecated was actually silently left in "because I wasn't sure you wanted it completely gone" or something.

I agree that exploring a codebase through prompts is actually quite nice! But the mental model you get from that is almost always warped - you have to supplement that with reading the code, where 9 times out of 10 you will find some kind of discrepancy that you're unhappy with.

Why not optimize that process?

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