drob518The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok
> That wouldn’t even be a big violation of the vibe coding concept. You’re reading the innards a little but you’re only giving high-level, conceptual, abstract ideas about how problems should be solved. The machine is doing the vast majority, if not literally all, of the actual writing.
Claude Code is being produced at AI Level 7 (Human specced, bots coded), whereas the author is arguing that AI Level 6 (Bots coded, human understands somewhat) yields substantially better results. I happen to agree, but I'd like to call out that people have wildly different opinions on this; some people say that the max AI Level should be 5 (Bots coded, human understands completely), and of course some people think that you lose touch with the ground if you go above AI Level 2 (Human coded with minor assists).
I'm at a 5, and only because I've implemented a lot of guardrails, am using a typed functional language with no nulls, TDD red/green, and a good amount of time spent spec'ing. No way I'd be comfortable enough this high with a dynamic language.
I could probably get to a 7 with some additional tooling and a second max 20 account, but I care too much about the product I'm building right now. Maybe for something I cared less about.
IMO if you're going 7+, you might as well just pick a statically typed and very safe (small surface area) language anyways, since you won't be coding yourself.
You aren't leveling up here... these levels are simple measures of how you use the tools to do something. You can regularly do things from any level or multiple levels at the same time.
That's an interesting list. I think that the humans that will make the most progress in the next few years are the ones that push themselves up to the highest level of that list. Right now is a period of intense disruption and there are many coders that don't like the idea that their way of life is dead. There are still blacksmiths around today but for the most part it's made by factories and cheap 3rd world labor. I think the same is currently happening with coding, except it will allow single builders and designers to do the same thing as an entire team 5 years ago.
> I think the same is currently happening with coding, except it will allow single builders and designers to do the same thing as an entire team 5 years ago.
This part of your post I think signals that you are either very new or haven't been paying attention; single developers were outperforming entire teams on the regular long before LLMs were a thing in software development, and they still are. This isn't because they're geniuses, but rather because you don't get any meaningful speedup out of adding team members.
I've always personally thought there is a sweet spot at about 3 programmers where you still might see development velocity increase, but that's probably wrong and I just prefer it to not feel too lonely.
In any case teams are not there to speed anything up, and anyone who thinks they are is a moron. Many, many people in management are morons.
At work I am at level 4, but my side projects have embarrassingly crept into Level 6. It is very tempting to accept the features as is, without taking the time understand how it works
It's also a context-specific scale. I work in computer vision. Building the surrounding app, UI, checkout flow, etcetera is easily Level 6/7(sorry...) on this scale.
Building the rendering pipeline, algorithms, maths, I've turned off even level 2. It is just more of a distraction than it's worth for that deep state of focus.
So I imagine at least some of the disconnect comes from the area people work in and its novelty or complexity.
Far from solved! Though, like seemingly everything, it has benefited from the transformer architecture. And computer vision is kind of the "input", it usually sits intersecting with some other field i.e. cv for medical analysis is different to self driving is different to reconstruction for games/movies.
This is exactly true in my experience! The usefulness of AI varies wildly depending on the complexity, correctness-requirements, & especially novelty of the domain.
This attribute plus a bit of human tribalism, social echo-chambering, & some motivated reasoning by people with a horse in the race, easily explains the discord I see in rhetoric around AI.
I like this framing, but it does seem to imply that a whole dev shop, or a whole product, can or should be built at the same level.
The fact is, I think the art of building well with AI (and I'm not saying it's easy) is to have a heterogenously vibe-coded app.
For example, in the app I'm working on now, certain algorithmically novel parts are level 0 (I started at level 1, but this was a tremendously difficult problem and the AI actually introduced more confusion than it provided ideas.)
And other parts of the app (mostly the UI in this case) are level 7. And most of the middleware (state management, data model) is somewhere in between.
Identifying the appropriate level for a given part of the codebase is IMO the whole game.
100% agree. Velocity at level 8 or even 7 is a whole order of magnitude faster than even level 5. Like you said, identifying the core and letting everything else move fast is most of the game. The other part is finding ways to up the level at which you’re building the core, which is a harder problem.