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I refuse to call it vibe coding, but I prompted my way to a command line tool, written in C, that converts millimeters to inches and vice versa. A few prompts later, I got something that works, and a man page with usage examples. 🤯 I usually can't find the time to create man pages or remember how.

The ability to generate code like this is impressive, but the ability to interact with the tool to explain things I don't understand is the game changing part to me. Even when using this tool, I'm still learning. I also noticed that I'm not reaching for my web browser to look things up.

My take: AI can enhance expertise but cannot replace it. You have to know what good looks like.

This part is what makes me miserable when using such tools to work on complex domains with problems that are too open. Even with all the good practices possible, sometimes it is excruciating to have to prompt the same thing 20 times to get a very bad result, with bad architecture and performance.

At this point I consider this a first draft and want to spend my time walking through the entire codebase, line by line, and make sure I understand everything, and fix things up to match my coding style and preferences. Question is, is this faster than just writing this whole thing myself?

It's almost like I'm writing the application twice. A good first draft, a detailed review, and lots of refactoring until it's just right. But isn't that how I've always done it? Is this a better workflow than the one I had before? Can this do things I can't? Those are the open questions for me.