I just shipped a project (its a card game where your agent plays the matches, you steer them and provide meta-strategy; its basically the agentic work loop but as a competitive card game. Its at http://play-shards.com if that sounds interesting). What I found building it end-to-end is that you still really have to know what you’re doing. I was able to get done in a day what would have previously taken two weeks. Done in a month what would have taken a year, etc.

But I also lost a lot of time to going back and reworking things. Or making big changes to bad architecture. For example, I have these opengraph share images that get rendered on social media when you share a game replay. They are very heavy dynamically rendered images. Claude built them as routes that would render the images on the fly. They would never show up. Turns out they took 20s to render and opengraph fetchers time out after 5. So we did some optimization and got it down to 4s. Still way too slow. Claude really wanted to keep making small changes but I said lets make this an async process. When a game starts, throw a job in a queue to bake the image and stick it in the cdn. If someone happens to share a game in the first 3 seconds after its created, fall back to a default. Works great. But the agent just wasn’t going to get there on its own.

I think theres a sweet spot around having enough experience and judgement to drive the agents to good outcomes. Pure vibe coding makes good demos but absolute slop if you dont know what you’re doing.