I spent the last 6 months reviewing all of the AI generated code primarily with gpt 5.3 codex but after I bought the subscription I also used gpt 5.5 and although I was constantly rejecting the bad code and I was mostly happy with the end result.

Then they removed the approve everything manually mode and I thought, maybe I'm the one out of touch, I should try vibe coding. I gave it a big spec of things to implement and I was pretty vague on the details, but I was kind of hoping that the AI would get it right anyway.

I noticed that when you let the AI just do its thing, you spend a lot of time staring at the screen waiting for it to finish. No wonder all these people are obsessed with parallel agents.

Anyway, after a while it produced the end result and it was pretty bad and I don't even mean the code. This was with gpt 5.6 Terra. Definitively not the type of "did a week's worth of work in one hour" type of deal.

Meanwhile if you guide it with your own technical skills the end result is a tireless code generator that operates at 80% of the quality of your own code but is only roughly 1.5x to 2x faster than doing it yourself. The biggest multipliers come from making the AI do things humans don't want to do, like writing a bunch of thorough tests but those don't translate into increased productivity, the opposite in fact. They translate into higher software quality but if you vibe the tests and don't review them, even that disappears.