This right here is the single biggest win for coding agents. I see and directionally agree with all the concerns people have about maintainability and sprawl in AI-mediated projects. I don't care, though, because the moment I can get a project up on its legs, to where I can interact with some substantial part of its functionality and refine it, I'm off to the races. It's getting to that golden moment that constitutes 80% of what's costly about programming for me.
This is the part where I simply don't understand the objections people have to coding agents. It seems so self-evidently valuable --- even if you do nothing else with an agent, even if you literally throw all the code away.
PS
Put a weight on that bacon!
The second is that a hand-done prototype still teaches you something about the tech stack and the implementation - yes, the primary purpose is to get it running quickly so you can feel how it works, but there's usually some learning you get on the technical side, and often I've found my prototypes inform the underlying technical direction. With vibe coded prototypes, you don't get this - not only is the code basically unusable, but you really are back to starting from scratch if you decide to move forward - you've tested the idea, but you haven't really tested the tech or design.
I still think they're useful - I'm a big proponent of "prototype early," and we've been able to throw together some surprisingly large systems almost instantly with the LLMs - but I think you've gotta shift your understanding of the process. Non-LLM prototypes tend to be around step 4 or 5 of a hypothetical 10-step production process, LLM prototypes are closer to step 2. That's fine, but you need to set expectations around how much is left to do past the prototype, because it's more than it was before.
Then just don’t show it to management, no?
That's what's valuable to you. For me the zero to one part is the most rewarding and fun part, because that's when the possibilities are near endless, and you get to create something truly original and new. I feel I'd lose a lot of that if I let an AI model prime me into one direction.
It's not FUN building all the scaffolding and setting up build scripts and all the main functions and directory structures.
Nor do I want to use some kind of initialiser or skeleton project, they always overdo things in my opinion, adding too much and too little at the same time.
With AI I can have it whip up an MVP-level happy-paths-only skeleton project in minutes and then I can start iterating with the fun bits of the project.
This isn’t selling your soul; it is possible to let AI scaffold some tedious garbage while also dreaming up cool stuff the old fashioned way.
It sounds like the blank page problem is a big issue for you, so tools that remove it are a big productivity boost.
Not everyone has the same problems, though. Software development is a very personal endeavor.
Just to be clear, I am not saying that people in category A or category B are better/worse programmers. Just that everyone’s workflow is different so everyone’s experience with tools is also different.
The key is to be empathetic and trust people when they say a tool does or doesn’t work for them. Both sides of the LLM argument tend to assume everyone is like them.
But, if it is the interview from 2 years ago, it revolved more around autocomplete and language servers. Agentic tooling was still nascent so a lot of what we were seeing back then was basically tab models and chat models.
As the popular quote goes, "When the Facts Change, I Change My Mind. What Do You Do, Sir?"
The facts and circumstances have changed considerably in recent years, and I have too!
I'll stare blankly at a blank screen/file for hours seeking inspiration, but the moment I have something to criticise I am immediately productive and can focus.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Cunningham#Law
> The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer.
So it works in real life too
- People who like the act and craftsmanship of coding itself. AI can encourage slop from other engineers and it trivializes the work. AI is a negative.
- People who like general engineering. AI is positive for reducing the amount of (mundane) code to write, but still requires significant high-level architectural guidance. It’s a tool.
- People who like product. AI can be useful for prototyping but won’t won’t be able to make a good product on its own. It’s a tool.
- People who just want to build a MVP. AI is honestly amazing at making something that at least works. It might be bad code but you are testing product fit. Koolaid mode.
That’s why everyone has a totally different viewpoint.
Those who value craftsmanships would value LLM, since they can pick up new languages or frameworks much faster. They can then master the newly acquired skills on their own if preferred, or they can use LLM to help along the way.
> People who like product. AI can be useful for prototyping but won’t won’t be able to make a good product on its own. It’s a tool.
Any serious product often comprises of multiple modules, layers, interfaces. LLM can help greatly with building some of those building blocks. Definitely a useful tool for product building.
Because I have a coworker who is pushing slop at unsustainable levels, and proclaiming to management how much more productive he is. It’s now even more of a risk to my career to speak up about how awful his PRs are to review (and I’m not the only one on the team who wishes to speak up).
The internet is rife with people who claim to be living in the future where they are now a 10x dev. Making these claims costs almost nothing, but it is negatively effecting mine and many others day to day.
I’m not necessarily blaming these internet voices (I don’t blame a bear for killing a hiker), but the damage they’re doing is still real.
I really like building things, but they're all basically putting the same code together in slightly different ways, so the part I find rewarding isn't the coding, it's the seeing everything come together in the end. That's why I really like LLMs, they let me do all the fun parts without any of the boring parts I've done a thousand times before.
AI is an absolute boon for "getting off the ground" by offloading a lot of the boilerplate and scaffolding that one tends to lose enthusiasm for after having to do it for the 99th time.
> AI is excellent at being my muse.
I'm guessing we have a different definition for muse. Though I admit I'm speaking more about writing (than coding) here but for myself, a muse is the veritable fount of creation - the source of ideas.
Feel free to crank the "temperature" on your LLM until the literal and figurative oceans boil off into space, at the end of the day you're still getting the ultimate statistical distillation.
> "Put a weight on that bacon!" ?
Also this article shows responsible use of AI when programming; I don't think it fits the original definition of vibe coding that caused hysterics.
He called it "vibing" in the headline, which matches my suspicion that the term "vibe" is evolving to mean anything that uses generative AI, see also Microsoft "vibe working": https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2025/09/2...
Yep. It's vibe engineering, which simonw coined here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/7/vibe-engineering/
It’s not that I don’t know how to implement something, it’s that the agent can do so much of the tedious searching and trial and error that accompanies this ui framework code.
Notice that Mitchell maintains understanding of all the code through the session. It’s because he already understands what he needs to do. This is a far cry from the definition of “vibe coding” I think a lot of people are riding on. There’s no shortcut to becoming an expert.
Loving Ghostty!
https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues?q=is%3Aissue%2...
There’s interesting things to discuss here about LLM tooling and approaches to coding. But of course we’d rather complain about cmd-f ;)
That said, it certainly made me appreciate the complexity of such a "basic" feature when I started thinking about how to make this work when tailing a stream of text.
https://ghostty.org/docs/install/release-notes/1-2-0#roadmap
Word to the wise: Ghostty’s default scrollback buffer is only ~10MB, but it can easily be changed with a config option.
Have you tried the suggestions in https://ghostty.org/docs/help/terminfo#ssh? I don't know what issue you may be experiencing but this solved my issue with using htop in an ssh session.
It looks like Mitchell is using an agentic framework called Amp (I’d never heard of it) - does anybody else here use it or tried it? Curious how it stacks up against Claude Code.
Claude Code, Codex CLI and Gemini CLI are all (loosely) locked to their own models.
BTW, appreciate your many great write-ups - they’ve been invaluable for keeping up to date in this space.
I'll often make these few hail mary attempts to fix a bug. If the agent can figure it out, I can study it and learn myself. If it doesn't, it costs me very little. If the agent figures it out and I don't understand it, I back it out. I'm not shipping code I don't understand. While it's failing, I'm also tabbed out searching the issue and trying to figure it out myself."
Awesome characterization ("slop zone"), pragmatic strategy (let it try; research in parallel) and essential principle ("I'm not shipping code I don't understand.")
IMHO this post is gold, for real-world project details and commentary from an expert doing their thing.
https://ampcode.com/threads/T-9fc3eb88-5aa2-45e4-8f6d-03697f...
The user says "Consult the oracle." at the end of the prompt and the AI begins its answer with:
"I'm going to ask the oracle for advice on planning custom UI for Sparkle update notifications in the titlebar."
What does this refer to?
EDIT: Another comment in this thread says "It's currently Sonnet 4.5 by default but uses GPT-5 for the "oracle" second opinion", so I guess that is what it means.
This is pretty much how I use AI. I don't have it in my editor, I always use it in a browser window, but I bounce ideas off it, use it like a better search engine and even if I don't use the exact code it produces I do feel there's some value.
So not vibe coded, but AI assisted.
quite apart from the article itself, I'm reminded of how much we put up with from our operating systems. presentations and screen sharing have been a fact of life for a couple of decades now; why is it so hard to tell the operating system to strictly not allow anything other than that one window access to the screen?
At work, they help me to kickstart a task - taking the first step is very often the hardest part. It helps me grok new codebases and write boring parts.
But side projects is where the real fun starts - I can materialize random ideas extremely quickly. No more hours spent on writing boilerplate or fighting the tooling. I can delegate the parts I'm not good at the agent. Or one-prompt a feature, if I don't like the result or it doesn't work, I roll it back.
I'm slowly wondering if coding AI agents are turning into the best case scenario for workers. Maybe I'm being hopeful haha.
But having something that doesn't make you faster but just lets you be less concentrated and focused and mentally lazier while producing the same amount of work in the same time as a super dedicated and focused session would have. That's best case scenario here.
This is a post by a hugely respected developer (due to his past & current accomplishments), writing about his experiences in how to best leverage an AI coding assistant.
This is definitely the sweet spot imo. Any time I've been able to come up with a solid, hand coded pattern and have AI repeat in several similar areas has been the most rewarding experiences that I have had with it.
I once needed to define a large table of trigrams in C (for the purpose of distinguishing "English" from "not English"). Setting it up looked like this:
1. Download a book from Project Gutenberg.
2. Write something that went through the book character-by-character, and for every character, remembered the trigram ending there.
3. Make the form of "remembering" be "append a line of code to this file that says `array[char1][char2][char3] = 1`".
4. Now I have a really long C file that compiles into the dictionary I want.
It sounds to me kind of like you want to replace step 3 with an LLM. If that's right... what value is the LLM adding?
It worked so well that I am always trying to look for opportunities like this but honestly, it isn't that common. Many times you aren't creating a pattern and repeating - you are creating a new pattern. AI is good to chat with to get ideas and come up with an approach in these situations seems to be more effective to me.
Welp, that explains it. I haven't changed terminal in a while anyway...
- language - product - level of experience / seniority
This definitely relaxes my ai-hype anxiety
And to clarify, I don't mean output as "this feature works, awesome", but "this feature works, it's maintainable and the code looks as beautiful as I can make it"
Developers whining that they can do it better and that it will ruin software forget that business always goes with the “good enough” option.
Human receptionists were far better than IVRs and “press 3 for” automation, but it was cheaper and good enough. Now very few companies have human phone operators.
SDEs need to come to terms with the fact that the value associated with human coding has been degraded. Salaries don’t just go up forever. Human SDEs aren’t going away, and 10x engineers will still be very valuable, but overall the perceived value of SDEs and their comp as a job family will likely start slide rapidly from this point forward.
Good enough? Depends on who you ask. It was and is clearly terrible for the users (customers). People hate to navigate huge, invisible menus by slowly pressing buttons or speaking single words very clearly, but the business doesn't really care about that and deems it "worth it" for the money saved.
This is a pattern one can find all over the place: make something worse but cheaper, as long as someone else, not the business, bears the cost.
The "people yelling" are overwhelmingly pro-AI. I find the other side to be relatively quiet.