upvote
Honestly, I think it's great that you could get the thing you wanted done.

Consider this, though: Your anecdote has nothing to do with software engineering (or an engineering mindset). No measurements were done, no technical aspects were taken into consideration (you readily admit that you lack the knowledge to do that), you're not expecting to maintain it or seemingly to further develop it much.

The above situation has never actually been hard; the thing you made is trivial to someone who knows the basics of a small set of things. LLMs (not Claude Code) have made this doable for someone who knows none of the things and that's very cool.

But all of this really doesn't mean anything for solutions to more complex problems where more knowledge is required, or solutions that don't even really exist yet, or something that people pay for, or things that are expected to be worked on continuously over time, perhaps by multiple people.

When people decry vibecoding as being moronic, the subtext really is (or should be) that they're not really talking to you; they're talking to people who are delivering things that people are expected to pay for, or rely on as part of their workflow, and people who otherwise act like their output/product is good when it's clearly a mess in terms of UX.

reply
I really identify with this. As an engineer, I really do enjoy building things. However, a lot of times, what I want is a thing that is built. A lot of time, that means I build it, which sometimes I enjoy and sometimes I don't; so many of my half finished projects are things that I still think would be awesome to have but didn't care to invest the time in building.

LLM-driven develop lets me have the thing built without needing to build the thing, and at the same time I get to exercise some ways-to-build I don't use as often (management, spec writing, spec editing, proactive unblocking, etc.). I have no doubt my work with LLMs has strengthened mental muscles that are also be helpful in technical management contexts/senior+principal-level technical work.

reply