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Am I using the tools wrong or are others finding the same thing?
No, your vibe-coding is not more productive, unless your only metrics for productivity are commit counts, PR counts, deployment counts. I can commit, PR and deploy crap all day long and "score well" - and this is what people are clinging to with their ai-gen defenses. I'm really sorry to inform you that your experienced "speed-up" is just a trick of the brain (remembering from an article written, iirc, by Gurwinder, but I'm having trouble finding it now) - you're actually going slower, and your brain is tricking you into thinking it's faster because whilst the ai was "coding", you didn't have to, so it feels like more of a win than it actually is, considering the results.
Maybe spending $200/mo or whatever to access the top-of-the-line models will mitigate some of that, but I'd rather come up with the solution and gain the understanding myself, then spend the money on something worthwile.
In general, I think of it as a better kind of search. The knowledge available on the internet is enormous, and LLMs are pretty good at finding and synthesizing it relative to a prompt. But that's a different task than generating its own ideas. I think of it like a highly efficient secretary. I wouldn't ask my secretary how to solve a problem, but I absolutely would ask if we have any records pertaining to the problem, and perhaps would also ask for a summary of those records.
Like any new tool, there is a learning curve. The Curve is rather steep right now with the horizon changing to quickly. The right tool also matters a great deal; right now you can run a model at home on 32gb vram that's objectively better than gpt 3.5 from 2023 or grok 2.
>lus, the time I supposedly save building things gets eaten up debugging, correcting, improving the AI-generated slop.
Those complaining about ai slop are almost certainly complaining about lack of prompt engineering skills.
Let me also explain the proper evolution here.
In 2021, you would go to stackoverflow, copy some of your code or ask a question and hopefully someone helped you sometime. Then you'd get the help and probably paste their code in.
In 2024, you would go to AI, copy some of your code, ask a question and the AI responds quickly. The solution might be bad, buggy, and so you reprompt because your first prompt wasnt engineered well. You finally get good code and copy and paste.
In 2025, why all this copy and paste? Why not use agentic where it does the copy and paste for you. It knows what to read, and what to do.
Also 2025, what if you have AI also orchestrating 1 level higher and verifying that it itself is doing a good job.
Did take a look at gemini result, but then it was different from immediate results under it so didn't leave lot of confidence even to get simplest things right.
I have decided to be radical about AI and LLM: I don’t like them because they are a waste of time, and I would like them even less if they were this magical world-changing technology people want us to believe. I am at a point of my career where concerns of productivity or how to operate in large-scale tech companies are the least of my problems, while I increasingly appreciate the artistic craft of programming and computers, especially in small-scale to improve our lives rather than accumulate profit. So while I could admit LLMs they have their use, I want to consciously follow a path where human intelligence and well-being is of the utmost concern, and any attempt at creating intelligent machines is tantamount to blasphemy.
Under this philosophy, seeing that all the talk about imminent AGI has led to creating spam and porn at large scale, I can only roll my eyes and remain on the sidelines while we continue down this idiotic path of resource extraction and devaluation of human ingenuity for the profit of the few.