"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
Reliable agent-coded development only seems to work for small codebases. (And it’s amazing in Ruby for some reasons.)
I don't write code manually anymore, but Im still getting the exact code output that I want.
I'd consider it vibe-coding if you never read the code/plan.
For example, you could package this up in a bash alias `vibecode "my prompt"` instead of `claude -p "my prompt"` and it surely is still vibe-coding so long as you remain arms length from the plan/code itself.
Even for tests, I always thought the real valuable part of it was that it forced you to think about all the different cases, and that just having bunch of green checkboxes if anything was luring developers into a false sense of security
Before AI, you were often encumbered with the superficial aspects of a plan or implementation. So much that we often would start implementing first and then kinda feel it out as we go, saving advanced considerations and edge-cases for the future since we're not even sure what the impl will be.
That's useful for getting a visceral read on how a solution might feel in its fetal stage. But it takes a lot of time/energy/commitment to look into the future to think about edge cases, tests, potential requirement churn, alternative options, etc. and planning today around that.
With AI, agents are really good at running preformed ideas to their conclusion and then fortify it with edge-cases, tests, and trade-offs. Now your expertise is better spent deciding among trade-offs and deciding on what the surface area looks like.
Something that also just came to mind is that before AI, you would get married to a solution/abstraction because it would be too expensive to rewrite code/tests. But now, refactoring and updating tests is trivial. You aren't committed to a bad solution anymore. Or, your tests are kinda lame and brittle because they're vibe-coded (as opposed to not existing at all)? Ok, AI will change them for you.
I also think we accidentally put our foot on the scale in these comparisons. The pre-AI developer we'll imagine as a unicorn who always spends time getting into the weeds to suss out the ideal solution of every ticket with infinite time and energy and enthusiasm. The post-AI developer we'll imagine as someone who is incompetent. And we'll pit them against each other to say "See? There's a regression".
That said, iteration is much more difficult on established codebases, especially with production workflows where you need to be more than extra careful your migration is backwards compatible, doesn't mess up feature x,y,z,d across 5 different projects relying on some field or logical property.
We've all just seen the Claude Code source code. 4k class files. Weird try/catches. Weird trade-offs. Basic bugs people have been begging to fix left untouched.
Yes, there's a revolution happening. Yes, it makes you more productive.
But stop huffing the kool-aid and be realistic. If you think you're still deciding about the trade-offs, I can tell you with sincerity that you should go try and refactor some of the code you're producing and see what trade-offs the AI is ACTUALLY making.
Until you actually work with the code again, it's ridiculously easy to miss the trade-offs the AI is making while it's churning out it's code.
I know this because we've got some AI heavy users on our team who often just throwing the AI code straight into the repo with properly checking it. And worse, on a code review, it looks right, but then when something goes wrong, you go "why did they make that decision?". And then you notice there's a very AI looking comment next to the code. And it clicks.
They didn't make that decision, they didn't choose between the trade-offs, the AI did.
I've seen weird timezone decisions, sorting, insane error catching theatre, changing parts of the code it shouldn't have even looked at, let alone changed. In the FE sphere it's got no clue how to use UseEffect or UseMemoization, it litters every div with tons of unnecessary CSS, it can't split up code for shit, in the backend world it's insanely bad at following prior art on things like what's the primary key field, what's the usual sorting priority, how it's supposed to use existing user contexts, etc.
And the amount of times it uses archaic code, from versions of the language 5-10 years ago is really frustrating. At least with Typescript + C#. With C# if you see anything that doesn't use the simpler namespacing or doesn't use primary constructors it's a dead give-away that it was written with AI.
We've now build a machine capable of something that can't even be called "technical debt" anymore - perhaps "technical usury" or something, and we're all supposed to love it.
Most coders know that support and maintenance of code will far outlast and out weigh the effort required to build it.
To some agents are tools. To others they are employees.
All I hear are empty promises of better software, and in the same breath the declaration that quality is overrated and time-to-ship is why vibecoding will eventually win. It's either one, or the other.
Lot of ppl are only in the beginning stages so they think its different because they came up with some fancy looking formal process to generate vibe.
the state of the art of software engineering is to use AI. it's just reality
But no matter how much code, including tests that AI can generate there was only one human thinking about those prompts, for a few months.
Any defects in that single human's thought process for overall architecture, security architecture, test architecture and coverage were not reviewed by any other human who might think differently and catch things that were missed. Ideally they were all at least reviewed by AI, but how differently operate from itself? It isn't particularly good at detecting its own errors without a human telling it to, which means the human needs to detect it in the first place.
Perhaps my most important point here is simply everyone here on HN is aware of all of these things, and as excited as some of us are about AI coded endeavors, the top response here will likely be the top response for many years - how do I know it isn't garbage? AI might be able to generate code fast, but informed users will definitely develop trust in it on a more human time scale.
I think the core idea of addressing a core architecture security defect in Wordpress has a legs. I'd make the case that the security architecture demonstrated here is table stakes for new software projects in 2026 when it clearly wasn't really conceivable in 2003. Though I'd also argue that many of the top Wordpress plugins should be shipped as "batteries included" in any successor, spiritual or otherwise - it would remain important to be extensible beyond those, securely.
A spiritual successor to Wordpress designed to run modern cloud infrastructure is a neat thing no doubt.
But after handling a bunch of horrible Wordpress and PHP stuff in my life lately, I'm tacking a bit of begging onto my hopefully useful response. Someone, anyone, AI coded or not, please work on a COMPLETE successor to Wordpress. And PHP really - though I do think taking care of Wordpress would entirely deal with the PHP problem.
What do I mean? All the modern table stakes stuff: * API first * fast bits in Rust (or Zig whatever IDK) * WASM * modern security architecture * batteries included - it is extremely dumb to have to add a plugin for calendars/dates/events and have about 100+ options for those. * designed to be deployed into modern clouds.. but also self-hostable on a single server, or colocated by small (cheap!) providers - ie: addressing ALL of the user base of Wordpress * one-click migration from Wordpress. Wordpress does this "with itself" to allow admins to move from one provider to another. Without this feature, might as well not bother
There is a business opportunity here I believe, though I'm not proposing a business model per se. A lot of people, myself included pay for Wordpress hosting while also hating it and being ready to leap at an alternative - even if it cost more.
Well that's because actual vibe coding is a completely separate thing from "LLM assisted coding, know what you’re doing but use LLMs to do tedious stuff".
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "started calling it", but vibe coding doesn't need a new name, it needs people to be clear about what they mean.
yeah.