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Comment by t-writescode | Hacker News Reader

Route A seems genuinely horrifying to me - maybe not for small and/or helper scripts; but for anything substantial. For anything that bites you or someone else hard when things go bad.

I don’t want a vibe-coded, mass-produced diabetes tracking app, or banking tool, or tax management software. I don’t want a vibe-coded power grid analysis software.

I don’t care if a person’s little, local scripting thing is vibe-coded. I don’t care if an artist’s 0->1 game code is vibe-coded; but that’s not what a lot of the things we’re talking about here really are.

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Route A is good for rapid, disposable prototyping. If you ever have a stray thought, “I wonder how this would work if the whole paradigm were turned sideways”, you now have a chance to preview a “working” version of your idea. If you like it, discard the code and reimplement it correctly. In this way, I think it can be a good adjunct to sketches and other lofi prototyping techniques. Just don’t outsource the creative ideation to the LLM, because all you’ll get are the same solutions as everyone else.

Have you seen many of the replies in this thread and others? They’re not doing that. They’re putting it into production code. Their company’s thought leaders are trying to say that review itself is a waste of time, etc.

That’s not “disposable prototyping” that’s whole versions of the codebase written with barely a human in sight.

Yes; my point was not related to any of that.

Route A is what concretely what is behind those "a select few are seeing 100x productivity increases" posts. agents bring enterprise-level engineering to the IC. your average enterprise PM has no idea how the code works either but knows who to call when it breaks or needs a new feature added. the industry split on agentic use lies in how much and to what degree you believe "but AI is different!" in this analogy

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