by kevinsync | 2026-01-07 04:56:23+00:00
Man, I've been biting my tongue all day with regards to this thread and overall discussion.

I've been building a somewhat-novel, complex, greenfield desktop app for 6 months now, conceived and architected by a human (me), visually designed by a human (me), implementation heavily leaning on mostly Claude Code but with Codex and Gemini thrown in the mix for the grunt work. I have decades of experience, could have built it bespoke in like 1-2 years probably, but I wanted a real project to kick the tires on "the future of our profession".

TL;DR I started with 100% vibe code simply to test the limits of what was being promised. It was a functional toy that had a lot of problems. I started over and tried a CLI version. It needed a therapist. I started over and went back to visual UI. It worked but was too constrained. I started over again. After about 10 complete start-overs in blank folders, I had a better vision of what I wanted to make, and how to achieve it. Since then, I've been working day after day, screen after screen, building, refactoring, going feature by feature, bug after bug, exactly how I would if I was coding manually. Many times I've reached a point where it feels "feature complete", until I throw a bigger dataset at it, which brings it to its knees. Time to re-architect, re-think memory and storage and algorithms and libraries used. Code bloated, and I put it on a diet until it was trim and svelte. I've tried many different approaches to hard problems, some of which LLMs would suggest that truly surprised me in their efficacy, but only after I presented the issues with the previous implementation. There's a lot of conversation and back and forth with the machine, but we always end up getting there in the end. Opus 4.5 has been significantly better than previous Anthropic models. As I hit milestones, I manually audit code, rewrite things, reformat things, generally polish the turd.

I tell this story only because I'm 95% there to a real, legitimate product, with 90% of the way to go still. It's been half a year.

Vibe coding a simple app that you just want to use personally is cool; let the machine do it all, don't worry about under the hood, and I think a lot of people will be doing that kind of stuff more and more because it's so empowering and immediate.

Using these tools is also neat and amazing because they're a force multiplier for a single person or small group who really understand what needs done and what decisions need made.

These tools can build very complex, maintainable software if you can walk with them step by step and articulate the guidelines and guardrails, testing every feature, pushing back when it gets it wrong, growing with the codebase, getting in there manually whenever and wherever needed.

These tools CANNOT one-shot truly new stuff, but they can be slowly cajoled and massaged into eventually getting you to where you want to go; like, hard things are hard, and things that take time don't get done for a while. I have no moral compunctions or philosophical musings about utilizing these tools, but IMO there's still significant effort and coordination needed to make something really great using them (and literally minimal effort and no coordination needed to make something passable)

If you're solo, know what you want, and know what you're doing, I believe you might see 2x, 4x gains in time and efficiency using Claude Code and all of his magical agents, but if your project is more than a toy, I would bet that 2x or 4x is applied to a temporal period of years, not days or months!