This is highly debatable. They look better, but whenever I inspect the walls and see what is holding the house together, I just shrug and leave my contact info, because I know I’ll be called to fix the mess.
> ...and building them increasingly feels like magic.
Engineering should not feel like magic to those with a proper education. Otherwise, we are merely practicing alchemy.
Unfortunately the author never even tried to debate. He made a big mental leap from "you can build entire neighborhoods and immediately remodel them with a click" to "the houses are better", with no word on how and why they are they better.
When something feels increasingly like magic it means you understand less and less of it. So in fact you are less and less qualified to say anything about the result.
The author is wowed by the process and the glitz and sees this as an equivalent to "quality of results".
Sure, quality and security suffer, but you're just to look at any airline's mobile app to see how little quality matters.
Sure, it gave you a bad E. coli infection, but look how much of it you could eat.
You use a very selective or narrow definition of "better". The "worse" gets swept under the rug without the step where you balance to see if you have a net win. But at least unlike the author of the tweet you made your definition clear, and I appreciate that.
Maybe that was possible 2 years ago, but for the last year it's just not simply true.
Sure there will be codebases that will get messy, outgrow the amateur vibe coder, etc. But AI is already better than 90% coders. Certainly can focus better than 99% of coders.