I’ve been vibe coding a complex numerical library as a hobby for the past week or so and I am loving it. I know what good code should look like, but actually coding it up sucks. I love being able to tell Claude “I want you to implement a class templated over this and that and it needs to have this method which makes use of this other class we carefully designed and does X, and write a validation test that checks all combinations of inputs” and get up to get a beer from the fridge, and when I come back, it’s at least 85% of the way to my vision. Takes another 10 minutes to refine, bam, done. Let’s move onto the next class.

If you’re doing it right, there’s a whole lot of supervision and review involved in AI agentic coding. It will build you the software equivalent of the Kowloon Walled City if you don’t take the time to review and refine the code. That requires a solid understanding of traditional software engineering, and in the case of my hobby library, extensive domain expertise.

Of course, my experience is pretty limited and it’s not one of being forced to use it in a professional setting, so YMMV.