Vibe coding doesn’t work for the imbedded system code that I am working on, which includes layered state machines, hardware drivers, and wire level protocol stacks. But supervised AI code generation definitely does work.
You need a highly refined sense of “smell” and intuition about architecture and data design, but if you give good specifications and clear design goals and architectural guidance, it’s like managing a small team but 12x faster iteration.
I sometimes am surprised with feature scope or minor execution details but usually whenever I drill down I’m seeing what I expected to see, even more so than with humans.
If I didn’t have the 4 decades of engineering and management experience I wouldn’t be able to get anything near the quality or productivity.
It’s an ideal tool for seasoned devs with experience shipping with a team. I can do the work of a team of 5 in this type of highly technical greenfield engineering, and I’m shipping better code with stellar documentation… and it’s also a lot less stressful because of the lack of interpersonal dynamics.
But… there’s no way I would give this to a person without technical management experience and expect the same results, because the specification and architectural work is critical, and the ability to see the code you know someone else is writing and understand the mistakes they will probably make if you don’t warn them away from it is the most important skillset here.
In a lot of ways I do fear that we could be pulling up the ladder, but if we completely rethink what it means to be a developer we could teach with an emphasis on architecture, data structures, and code/architecture intuition we might be able to prepare people to step into the role.
Otherwise we will end up with a lot of garbage code that mostly works most of the time and breaks in diabolically sinister ways.
You need a highly refined sense of “smell” and intuition about architecture and data design, but if you give good specifications and clear design goals and architectural guidance, it’s like managing a small team but 12x faster iteration.
I sometimes am surprised with feature scope or minor execution details but usually whenever I drill down I’m seeing what I expected to see, even more so than with humans.
If I didn’t have the 4 decades of engineering and management experience I wouldn’t be able to get anything near the quality or productivity.
It’s an ideal tool for seasoned devs with experience shipping with a team. I can do the work of a team of 5 in this type of highly technical greenfield engineering, and I’m shipping better code with stellar documentation… and it’s also a lot less stressful because of the lack of interpersonal dynamics.
But… there’s no way I would give this to a person without technical management experience and expect the same results, because the specification and architectural work is critical, and the ability to see the code you know someone else is writing and understand the mistakes they will probably make if you don’t warn them away from it is the most important skillset here.
In a lot of ways I do fear that we could be pulling up the ladder, but if we completely rethink what it means to be a developer we could teach with an emphasis on architecture, data structures, and code/architecture intuition we might be able to prepare people to step into the role.
Otherwise we will end up with a lot of garbage code that mostly works most of the time and breaks in diabolically sinister ways.