It's hardly original, but my take is that vibe coding works brilliantly for personal projects (or potentially for tiny startups that need to rapidly churn out CRUD boilerplate, API integrations, etc), but terribly for most large commercial systems.
I'm having fun with Claude Code and Vibe Kanban on personal projects, and before that I spent a lot of time with both the Windsurf and Cursor agents. It's making me literally 10x more productive on personal projects, maybe even 50x.
On personal projects:
- no-one but me needs to decide on requirements
- no-one but me needs to make decisions
- no-one but me needs to maintain the code going forward
- much of the time I'm intentionally using languages and frameworks that I am somewhat clueless about, and an LLM providing continuous ideas (even if sometimes entirely silly ones) stops me getting stuck
- I don't mind if there are large chunks of useless or half-working code
On commercial projects:
- every line of code is a massive liability. Every line needs to be reviewed by another engineer, and every developer who joins the project needs to be aware of it, take it into consideration when making changes elsewhere, and potentially debug it if something goes wrong
- senior engineers are almost always hired to work with languages and technologies they are already very familiar with, meaning for many tasks it's often quicker to write out the code by hand (or perhaps with Cursor's auto-complete) than guide an LLM to do it
- much of the time is spent in meetings trying to unearth the real product requirements or providing updates to stakeholders
- much of the time is spent reading old code and working out how to implement things in extremely large and complex systems in a minimally disruptive way
- a lot of time is spent reviewing other people's PRs, and getting infuriated when people (often either very junior or very senior) produce 1000 line PRs consisting of unnecessary changes, excessive boilerplate, half-finished experiments, and things that clearly haven't been tested properly. This was the case long before LLMs, AI just makes it ever more tempting for people to act this way.
- trying to avoid or gently negotiate political games over who is in control of the project, or who gets to makes technical decisions
if we have to put numbers on it, I'm attempting projects I wouldn't have, because the startup cost was too high, so does that make me infinity times more productive on that project because the denominator otherwise would have been zero?
I'm having fun with Claude Code and Vibe Kanban on personal projects, and before that I spent a lot of time with both the Windsurf and Cursor agents. It's making me literally 10x more productive on personal projects, maybe even 50x.
On personal projects:
- no-one but me needs to decide on requirements
- no-one but me needs to make decisions
- no-one but me needs to maintain the code going forward
- much of the time I'm intentionally using languages and frameworks that I am somewhat clueless about, and an LLM providing continuous ideas (even if sometimes entirely silly ones) stops me getting stuck
- I don't mind if there are large chunks of useless or half-working code
On commercial projects:
- every line of code is a massive liability. Every line needs to be reviewed by another engineer, and every developer who joins the project needs to be aware of it, take it into consideration when making changes elsewhere, and potentially debug it if something goes wrong
- senior engineers are almost always hired to work with languages and technologies they are already very familiar with, meaning for many tasks it's often quicker to write out the code by hand (or perhaps with Cursor's auto-complete) than guide an LLM to do it
- much of the time is spent in meetings trying to unearth the real product requirements or providing updates to stakeholders
- much of the time is spent reading old code and working out how to implement things in extremely large and complex systems in a minimally disruptive way
- a lot of time is spent reviewing other people's PRs, and getting infuriated when people (often either very junior or very senior) produce 1000 line PRs consisting of unnecessary changes, excessive boilerplate, half-finished experiments, and things that clearly haven't been tested properly. This was the case long before LLMs, AI just makes it ever more tempting for people to act this way.
- trying to avoid or gently negotiate political games over who is in control of the project, or who gets to makes technical decisions