I so want to like these vibe coding agents, and sometimes I do, but it really does kind of suck the joy out of things.
What I was hoping would be that I could effectively farm out work to my metaphorical AI intern while I get to focus on fun and/or interesting work. Sometimes that is what happens and it makes me very happy when it does. A lot of the time, however, it generates code that is wrong, or incomplete (while claiming it is complete), and so I end up having to babysit the code, either by further prompting or just editing the code.
And then it makes a lot of software engineering become "type prompt, sit and wait a minute, look at the code, repeat", which means I'm decidedly not focusing the fun part of the project and instead I'm just larping as a manager who backseat codes.
A friend of mine said that he likes to do this backwards: he writes a lot of the code himself and then he uses Claude Code to debug and automate writing tedious stuff like unit tests, and I think that might make it a little less mind numbing.
Also, very tangential, and maybe my prompting game isn't completely on point here, but Codex seems decidedly bad at concurrent code [1]. I was working on some lock-free data store stuff, and Codex really wanted to add a bunch of lock files that were wholly unnecessary. Oh, and it kept trying to add mutexes into Rust, no matter how many times I tell it I don't want locks and it should use one-shot channels instead. To be fair, when I went and fixed the functions myself in a few spots and then told it to use that as an example, it did get a little better.
[1] I think this particular case is because it's trained on example code from Github and most code involving concurrency uses locks (incorrectly or at least sub-optimally). I guess this particular problem may be more of the fault of American universities teaching concurrent programming incorrectly at the undergrad level.
What I was hoping would be that I could effectively farm out work to my metaphorical AI intern while I get to focus on fun and/or interesting work. Sometimes that is what happens and it makes me very happy when it does. A lot of the time, however, it generates code that is wrong, or incomplete (while claiming it is complete), and so I end up having to babysit the code, either by further prompting or just editing the code.
And then it makes a lot of software engineering become "type prompt, sit and wait a minute, look at the code, repeat", which means I'm decidedly not focusing the fun part of the project and instead I'm just larping as a manager who backseat codes.
A friend of mine said that he likes to do this backwards: he writes a lot of the code himself and then he uses Claude Code to debug and automate writing tedious stuff like unit tests, and I think that might make it a little less mind numbing.
Also, very tangential, and maybe my prompting game isn't completely on point here, but Codex seems decidedly bad at concurrent code [1]. I was working on some lock-free data store stuff, and Codex really wanted to add a bunch of lock files that were wholly unnecessary. Oh, and it kept trying to add mutexes into Rust, no matter how many times I tell it I don't want locks and it should use one-shot channels instead. To be fair, when I went and fixed the functions myself in a few spots and then told it to use that as an example, it did get a little better.
[1] I think this particular case is because it's trained on example code from Github and most code involving concurrency uses locks (incorrectly or at least sub-optimally). I guess this particular problem may be more of the fault of American universities teaching concurrent programming incorrectly at the undergrad level.