All vibe coding tools are selling a get rich quick scheme

> at first i was very hopeful i can finally 'build' now with my minimal tech skills

This is the problem. If you couldn't have coded it slowly in the old world, you will have problems coding it in AI world.

However if you have a lot of coding experience, you can now compress the time it would have taken you be an enormous amount. My experience is that I can now make extensive changes with very little effort, and very few dead ends. I've been able to take on entire secondary projects where I was just replication existing knowledge with slightly different tools.

Just this week I had a litmus test. I had an existing database that I'm pushing huge amount of data to. I decided to try a different underlying database. This would have taken me a full week of looking at documentation and writing supporting scripts, now I've done it in the spare time I had in two days of my actual work.

And it's not like the AI just did it all unsupervised. It threatened to do down the wrong path a few times, but each time I spotted it and steered it the way I wanted. I also asked it a few questions about curiosities I discovered in the emitted code, and that led to fixes as well.

If I didn't know how to code before, I would still be coding this alternative database.

> However if you have a lot of coding experience, you can now compress the time it would have taken you be an enormous amount. My experience is that I can now make extensive changes with very little effort, and very few dead ends. I've been able to take on entire secondary projects where I was just replication existing knowledge with slightly different tools.

This has not been my experience and it is very frustrating. I've been programming almost 20 years, I'm pretty good at it

I don't know where the disconnect is, but no matter how I try (and I am trying, I don't want to get left behind) I cannot get remotely good results from LLM coding tools

They always, always, always take longer to build what I want than just doing it myself

Same. I mostly just don't believe people when they say they get good results. Or i guess, i think my definition of "good results" must be very different than other people's.

My manager uses cursor and Claude for everything. I can always tell. He pretends like he wrote it himself even, but he obviously didn't. I end up rewriting big chunks of it, or finding all sorts of baffling quirks during review.

Idk, I'm just not at all willing to settle for "good enough," which means Claude doesn't really save me any time. If I'm going to do it, I'm going to do it right.

It's a good rubber duck, and it's good for scaffolding new projects (arguably), and it's good at converting code from one language to another or for generating a one-off bash script or something. That's about all i can get out of it.

My biggest beef is that I feel like settling for "good enough" is a one way ticket to vulnerability town

"Good enough" often has AWS keys embedded into the code itself, stupid things like that

I hold myself to a higher standard