Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49097418

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

It's not yet perfect, my sense is just that it's near the tipping point where models are efficient enough that running a local model is truly viable

I kind of wonder how close we are to alternative (not from a major AI lab) models being good enough for a lot of productive work and data sovereignty being the deciding factor.

For large pieces of work, I will iterate with CC to generate a feature spec. It's usually pretty good at getting you most of the way there first shot and then either have it tweak things or manually do so.

Implementation is having CC first generate a plan, and iterating with it on the plan - a bit like mentoring a junior, except CC won't remember anything after a little while. Once you get the plan in place, then CC is generally pretty good at getting through code and tests, etc. You'll still have to review it after for all the reasons others have mentioned, but in my experience, it'll get through it way faster than I would on my own.

To parallelize some of the work, I often have Visual Studio Code open to monitor what's happening while it's working so I can redirect early if necessary. It also allows me to get a head start on the code review.

I will admit that I spent a lot of time iterating on my way of working to get to where I am, and I don't feel at all done (CC has workflows and subagents to help with common tasks that I haven't fully explored yet). I think the big thing is that tools like CC allow us to work in new ways but we need to shift our mindset and invest time in learning how to use these tools.

Where I have found vibe coding as an approach really shine is if I need to write some sort of quick utility to get a task done. Something that might take an hour or more to slap together to solve some menial task that I need to do on a bunch of files. Here I can definitely throw it together quicker than manually and don't care if it is messy code.

Larger, more complicated apps that are meant for production are painful to try to get AI tools to build. Spend so much time prompting the AI to get the task done without breaking something else that I doubt I'm any faster than just hand coding it alongside a co-pilot