When I see a pro-AI person insisting that they are fully automated, I often scour their recent comments to find code or git repos they have shared. You find something every now and again.
My thinking is that I want to use this stuff, but don't find the agentic AI at all effective. I must be doing something wrong! So I should learn from the real world success of others.
A regular pattern is they say they're using vibe coding for complex problems. You check, and they're trivial features.
One egregious example was a basic randomizer to pick a string from a predetermined set, and save that value into an existing table to re-use later.
To me that's a trivial feature, a 15-30 minute task in a codebase I'm familiar with.
For this extremely AI bullish developer it was described as a major feature. The prompts were timestamped and it took them 1/2 day using coding agents.
They were sharing their .claude folder. It had 50 odd md files in it. I sampled a bunch of them and most of them boiled down to:
'You are an expert [dev/QA/architect/PM/tester]. Ultrathink. Be good'.
Worse, I looked at their linkedin, and on paper they looked experienced. Seeing their code, they were not.
There's a subset of the "fully automated" coders who are just bad. They are incapable of judging how bad AI code is. But vocally, and often aggressively, advocate for it.
Some are good, but I just can't replicate their success. And they're clearly also still hand-writing a lot of the code.
