Vibe code isn't meant to be reviewed

if there was an `if( randomly() ){ emit("error"); }` in there, we'd be right back to reviewing it and probably wouldn't bother with it in the first place. besides which, any work to the transformer itself necessitates review even for generated code, making sure that the output is actually what you expect it to be.

the idea that you shouldn't care what's in a function because your possibly-insufficient-over-the-interface tests passed is kind of insane.

I can't say for everyone, but for me it's hit-and-miss: if LLM starts with "Oh, sorry, you're right" that's a STRONG signal I have to take over right now or rethink the approach, or I get into the doom spiral of reprompting and waste half a day on something I could've done myself by that point, with only difference that after half a day with a coding agent I discovered no important domain or technical knowledge.

So, "how much" to me depends so very much on seemingly random factors, including the time of the day when Antropic decides to serve their quantised version instead of a normal one. On non-random too, like how difficult the domain area is, how well you described it in the prompt, and how well you crafted your system queries. And I hate it very much! At this point, I'm trigger-happy to take over the control and write the stuff that LLM can't in the "controlling package" and tell it to use it as an example / safety check.

With AIs/vibe coding/whatever you want to call it, there is no such benefit. It's more an opportunistic thing. You can delegate or do it yourself. If delegating is overall faster and better, it's an easy choice. Otherwise, it's your own time you are wasting.

Using this stuff (like everybody else) over the last two years has definitely planted the thought that I need to start thinking in terms of having LLM friendly code bases. It seems I get a lot better results when things are modular, well documented, and not too ambiguous. Of course that's what makes code bases nice to work with in general so these are not bad goals to have.

Working with large code bases is hard and expensive (more tokens) and create room for ambiguity. So, break it up. Modularize. Apply those SOLID principles. Or get your agentic coding tool of choice to refactor things for you. No need to do that yourself. All you need to do is nudge things in the right direction. And that would be a good idea without AIs anyway. So, all this stuff does is remove excuses for you to not have better code.

If you only vibe code and don't care, you just create a big mess that then needs cleaning up. Or for somebody else to clean up because what's your added value at that point? Your vibes aren't that valuable. Working software is. The difference between a product that makes money and a vibe coded thing that you look at and than discard is that one pays the bills and the other one is just for your entertainment.