Vibe coding: Empowering and imprisoning

Well the article went in a totally different direction to what I expected.

I do feel imprisoned by my vibe coded apps. But it's because I've lost control of them. I don't understand the code that was written well enough to work on it myself any more. So now I'm at the mercy of the AI to maintain it. When there's a bug to fix I just type it into the LLM and pray and hope that it will be able to solve it, because if it can't, I'm screwed.

It's actually a big reason I'm sticking with tools like Aider for things I care about and not going fully agentic yet. Having an agent do reams of work and then submit hundreds of lines of code for me to examine is counter productive to my longer term aims. I'm happy with the 2-3x improvement I get from lesser tools that still leave me in control.

I recently tried out Copilot with Sonnet to implement whole C++ headers into .cpp files and it did very well making the implementation consistent, readable, and easy to reason about. Not having much C++ experience, it made the whole process much easier - some memory/etc errors in my own code would have been intractible to fix without it. It was also fantastic at turning a postgresql implementation file of that header into an sqlite implementation that worked/passed tests on the first try.

Overall, it seems like defining the structure to some extent yourself and letting the agent fill in implementation and suggest architecture changes is a good way to go to get a lot of useful work out of it without letting the structure of the overall app run away from you.