Pure vibe coding will quickly end up with a complete mess. But in the hands of a good engineer that understands how to manage it and can give it explicit technical direction in how to write the code, it usually writes high quality code and is a huge productivity multiplier. Like any complex tool, knowing how to use the tool is a skill in itself. Almost everyone I know in the industry is using it and people who aren’t will get left behind (I know that’s a cliche but it’s true).

All of this is true. What it omits though is that there are so few of us of sufficient skill to wield them without abdicating thinking to the clankers. Instead, what I see is the mid programmers shit out mid code at an astronomical rate, leaving more foibles and poor quality in the MRs that make it to me. I end up needing to claude-by-proxy more frequently than I like. If you never had curiosity paranoia before clankers existed, you’re sure as hell not going to have it now when you can most of the time implicitly trust what they output (eg. Sure, let’s do something extra that can throw and log that warning inside a high throughput ingestion pipeline for a very common case, WCGW?). The problem is that “most of the time” is not sufficient for systems that are responsible for vast sums of money and regulatory compliance.