The back/forth on whether the X community thinks vibe coding has any production value has been fascinating to observe. I thought it'd be fun to share an example today that I think is pretty representative of my experience with it so far. I was working on a bug today…
a strange edge case where we had banned someone who had a pending transaction where the transaction wasn't paid for yet. In this case, we cancel the transaction. But the listing still had a status of "Sold" after we unbanned the person which creates a problem.
Claude did an assessment of the issue and found the problem fairly quickly. However, during its answer, it also called out something it didn't need to.
This particular callout is fascinating because it's the kind of thing SWEs routinely miss IME, or don't even possess the capability to know b/c of larger code bases.
Now, Claude's initial recommendation was to just fix the unban method. It took me on my own to recognize the importance of that callout and ask "If we already have an existing method, why wouldn't we just use that and delete this incomplete duplicated one?" This is important.
But after that simple question, it did indeed agree that that could be a stronger long-term approach. But instead of just agreeing, it went one step further and evaluated the ramifications of that decision, yet again something that most SWEs I've worked with would not have done.
I feel like this is representative of what it looks like to use these tools successfully. Yes, if I was just vibing it with no experience, I wouldn't have the discernment to look into the outputs and push/tug on it and ask questions. A 20+yr career in software helps me there.
But also, these tools are routinely doing things that would routinely get missed by some of the best engineers alive that I've worked with. And even if they DID think about it, it would have been a 2 week "discovery sprint" vs. Claude's 1m 34s. 👏
I can see how just straight prompt vibe coding could result in some pretty messy production apps. But I also keep finding that with a career's worth of exp in software and being careful, slow, and paying attention, it can do some pretty incredible/helpful things.
