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Comment by lumost | Hacker News Reader

My honest take? Vibe coding makes a senior engineer 2-4x more productive depending on the project. Very large projects see diminishing returns down to 0% productivity gain or negative. I can probably supervise 10 concurrent vibe coding sessions with a little thought on how to structure the tasks and code. This is like giving each of your top engineers their own staff.

The AI coders are different from human coders in what they can and can’t do, they are both profoundly dumb - and extremely technically proficient *at the same time*.

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Insane take. 2-4x productive until you have to refactor or fix anything and realize you just created a 10,000 line steaming pile.

I disagree with this negative take. I can use Claude to quickly explore libraries, I’m not familiar with, and have developed a development process where I describe the purpose of each class and method in a markdown file , and have Claude, Gemini, deep seek and Chat all pitch descriptions of how to implement it in shared markdown files. I correct their misconceptions and inefficiencies before any code is written, I can write this code myself, but I’m finding I can work faster like this.

So when Claude lies to you what do you do? Your workflow is crazy. Just write the fucking code.

Importantly this is how I work on my own personal fun projects, so it really doesn't matter if is productive, I find it enjoyable so I'm going to keep exploring it, there will be pros and cons, don't have the final ficture on that yet

claude can't manage the big picture of what I'm trying to achieve, and claude and the others hallucinate all the time.

I have them all write simple tests for the code, so if they introduce me to a new library, I have tests to prove their assumptions.

And I review everything and tweak everything.

In my day job I work as a lead dev / arch, this isn't must different, working with Claude is like working with a large team of very inconsistent devs, with deep knowledge, but a tenous grasp on reality that struggle with attention. So not that much different from real people?

My dad wrote code generators, back in the 70's and 80's that I did some work on early in my career, those code generators which took a high level description of a program and output mainframe code, made most of the money that paid for raising my siblings and I. From that perspective I've been roboting myself my entire professional life.

So you've managed to ensure that the one things you never have to do is come up with any ideas. You're turning yourself into the robot

That's cool, I will try it!

I recently spent 2 weeks fixing a project that a senior engineer seemingly vibe coded while I was on holiday. Prior to that, their work output was excellent in terms of quality and pace.

Those 2 weeks were absolute hell for me. I estimate I had to rewrite about 90% of the code. Everything was cobbled together and ultimately disposable. Unfortunately, this work was meant to be the first of several milestones and was completely unsalvageable as a foundation for the project.

I'm not opposed to using AI tools, I use them myself. But being on the receiving end and having to deal with someone else's vibe coded rubbish is truly dreadful.

I am opposed to them. I'm tired of being pushed by people who don't understand the profession to use crappy tools to be unrealistically productive. I hate what their presence has done to the industry and to the expectations placed on us.

Found the manager who doesn't code.

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