AI agents: Less capability, more reliability, please

My rule of thumb has thus far been: if I’m gonna allow AI to write any bit of code for me, then I must, at a bare minimum, be able to understand that code.

There’s no way I could do what some of these “vibe coders” are doing where they allow AI to write code for them that they don’t even understand.

That's only true as long as you want to modify said code. If it meets your bar for reliability then you won't need to understand it, much like how we don't really need to read/understand compiled assembly code so we largely trust the compiler.

A lot of these vibe coders just have a much lower bar for reliability than you.

How do you know if it meets your bar for reliability if you don’t understand the output? I don’t know that the analogy to a compiler is apples to apples. A compiler isn’t producing an answer based on statistically generating something that should look like the right answer.