Last week I just said f it and developed a feature by hand. No Copilot, no agents. Just good old typing and a bit of Intellisense. I ran into a lot of problems with the library I used, slowly but surely I got closer to the result I wanted. In the end my feature worked as expected, I understand the code I wrote and know about all the little quirks the lib has.
And as a added benefit: I feel accomplished and proud of the feature.
I work in an environment where access to LLMs is still quite restricted, so I write most of my code by hand at work. Conversely, after work I still have ideas for personal projects but mostly didn't have the energy to write them by hand. The ability to throw a half-baked idea at the LLM and get back half-baked code that runs and does most of what I asked for gives me the energy to work through refactoring and improving the code to make it do what I actually envisioned.
In the short term, you might see better outcomes with pure vibecoding...but in the long term, when you're mentally burnt out, cynical, and losing motivation, that's a bad outcome both in terms of productivity and your own mental health.
We need to find the Goldilocks optimal level of AI assistance that doesn't leave everyone hating their jobs, while still boosting productivity.
I don’t believe everyone find vibecoding as draining as you. You have to be a true artisan for that and most people aren’t. In fact, in this transition state folks are more than happy to finish off their assigned tickets and spend the rest of the sprint working on personal projects or slacking off.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bliss_point_(food)