Getting a piece of software done, the main work, the 80%, takes 20% of effort.
Refining the remaining 20% on the other hand takes 80% of all effort and time invested.
Another aspect is burnout. Sure, vibe coding means sped up development, but what I noticed was… I also lost interest in projects much quicker. Unless it directly delivers something I need - e.g. I’ve built a 3D printer stand for my new Bambu H2C - it’s going on the pile of “80% finished crap”.
And the thing is, you CAN build an AI setup that automates everything. I’ve put together a skill/agent/rule stack that is essentially an entire company’s engineering department. It works autonomously, only looping in the user for major decisions (and those decisions get a proper report the user can read to contextualise the decision itself). It creates initiatives, epics, then refines those into stories, then stories get planned with tasks, subtasks, etc., which then get the design-develop-test-verify loop (test here stands for test writing, while verify is the QA smoke test). Stories get the appropriate level of detail, with a BDD approach (so happy path, unhappy path, and edge case scenarios are defined before work begins), experts are created on-demand, the list goes on. All of this with 6-8-10 parallel teams.
It works incredibly effectively.
It also burns through tokens like there’s no tomorrow. I let it run over a weekend - Saturday morning to Sunday midnight. It correctly identified the project needs for a relatively small thing (something a sole developer would write over 2-3 months), created an appropriate enterprise approach, broke it down into 9 MVP stages, and in 2 days, delivered the first four of those.
At the cost of burning through an entire weekly allowance of Claude Max 20X tokens…
I guess I could pay another £150 for a secondary account and have it churn through my old projects to refine and finalise them, but it’s hardly worth the money.
And no, while I say that it’s a “full company”, it’s only because I am an actual software engineer, I understand the code being written, I understand the processes, the flows. It’s not something you can toss to a complete beginner and have them build a successful business on top.
It’s the 80/20 principle.
Getting a piece of software done, the main work, the 80%, takes 20% of effort.
Refining the remaining 20% on the other hand takes 80% of all effort and time invested.
Another aspect is burnout. Sure, vibe coding means sped up development, but what I noticed was… I also lost interest in projects much quicker. Unless it directly delivers something I need - e.g. I’ve built a 3D printer stand for my new Bambu H2C - it’s going on the pile of “80% finished crap”.
And the thing is, you CAN build an AI setup that automates everything. I’ve put together a skill/agent/rule stack that is essentially an entire company’s engineering department. It works autonomously, only looping in the user for major decisions (and those decisions get a proper report the user can read to contextualise the decision itself). It creates initiatives, epics, then refines those into stories, then stories get planned with tasks, subtasks, etc., which then get the design-develop-test-verify loop (test here stands for test writing, while verify is the QA smoke test). Stories get the appropriate level of detail, with a BDD approach (so happy path, unhappy path, and edge case scenarios are defined before work begins), experts are created on-demand, the list goes on. All of this with 6-8-10 parallel teams.
It works incredibly effectively.
It also burns through tokens like there’s no tomorrow. I let it run over a weekend - Saturday morning to Sunday midnight. It correctly identified the project needs for a relatively small thing (something a sole developer would write over 2-3 months), created an appropriate enterprise approach, broke it down into 9 MVP stages, and in 2 days, delivered the first four of those.
At the cost of burning through an entire weekly allowance of Claude Max 20X tokens…
I guess I could pay another £150 for a secondary account and have it churn through my old projects to refine and finalise them, but it’s hardly worth the money.
And no, while I say that it’s a “full company”, it’s only because I am an actual software engineer, I understand the code being written, I understand the processes, the flows. It’s not something you can toss to a complete beginner and have them build a successful business on top.