All vibe coding tools are selling a get rich quick scheme

The trick is that you have to be a good coder to get the most out of "vibe" coding. It works great for me, but I deploy all of the knowledge I've acquired over the decades as a professional developer. You need to know how to architect systems, what data structures and algorithms to ask for, how to design a product, many facets of graphic and user interface design, how to parcel out work, how to parallelize tasks. Even which ideas are worth pursuing is an intuition you build up over years. "Vibe" coding really is magic and I'm highly scaled, but I don't see how it could possibly work for all but the most senior developers. In some sense, it's like writing LISP macros on steroids.

Absolutely. It's augmentation not automation, it does what I want or it gets the hose again.

You make the framework and it colours in the lines. If you don't draw the pattern first you're going to get a kindergarten mess. There are times I'm amazed by its suggestions but it will also cheat and "lie" and if you're not paying attention, you'll miss it.

But these days many tasks for me consist of: I need this, look how I did it here before, and follow this exact pattern through to the end and write tests, too. And the results are usually exactly what I would have done. Because it is an excellent mimic. But if I hadn't put the work into the framework, it would be awful.

It’ll cheat a lot when writing unit tests. Particularly “agentic” tools like cursor. It’ll get a test to pass, even if it’s against a laughably incorrect implementation.

I’ve ended up with tests called stuff like “foobar successfully returns impossible value that suggests programmer error” lmao

Yeah, or "bug was pre-existing and not my fault so shrug, here's a TODO and we'll just say it passed" (not those exact words, but close)