AI coding assistants promise speed, but do they deliver? Explore data, developer insights, and security risks showing why AI feels faster but often slows production. Learn where tools like Cursor and Claude Code help, and where they fail.
I keep seeing the “it’s good for prototyping” argument they post here, in real life.
For non-coders it holds up if you ignore the security risk of someone running literally random code they have no idea what does.
But seeing it from developers, it smells of bullshit. The thing they show are always a week of vibing gave them some stuff I could hack up in a weekend. And they could too if they invested a few days of learning e.g. html5, basic css and read the http fetch doc. And the learning cost is a one-time cost - later prototypes they can just bang out. And then they also also have the understanding needed to turn it into a proper product if the prototype pans out.
I disagree. What I could hack over a weekend starting a project, I can do in a couple hours with AI, because starting a project is where the typing bottleneck is, due to all of the boilerplate. I can’t type faster than an LLM.
Also, because there are hundreds of similar projects out there and I won’t get to the parts that make mine unique in a weekend, that’s the perfect use case for “vibe coding”.
I say this as someone who’s not particularly a fan of AI and tries to use it very sparingly.
For me AI is not so much about productivity gains. Where I find it useful instead is to push me past the initial block of starting something from scratch. It’s that initial dopamine rush that the article mentions, from seeing an idea starting to take shape.
In that sense, if I compare projects by time spent on them with or without AI after they are completed, I too would probably find there were no productivity gains. But some of these things I would never get started at all by myself.
If you are a senior developer in a corporation, you know what you have to do, you are an expert in your domain, you rarely start something really new (and when you do, it is only after endless discussions and studies on tools, language, tech stack, architecture). AI is probably not a great help for you.
But even in corporate life, there are a lot of things that are inportant but that you constantly set aside: from planning your career, to honing your communication skills or whatever it is that you could certainly learn to do (with time and dedication) but for some reason you keep postponing because you are not already an expert at them and it takes motivation to learn. That’s where AI found its niche in my life.
Especially, “being 70%” finished does not mean you will get a working product at all. If the fundamentale understanding is not there, you will not getting a working product without fundamental rewrites.
I have seen code from such bullshit developers myself. Vibe-coded device drivers where people do not understand the fundamentals of multi-threading. Why and when you need locks in C++. No clear API descriptions. Messaging architectures that look like a rats nest. Wild mix of synchronous and async code. Insistence that their code is self-documenting and needs neither comments nor doc. And: Agressivity when confronted with all that. Because the bullshit taints any working relationship.
I keep seeing the “it’s good for prototyping” argument they post here, in real life.
For non-coders it holds up if you ignore the security risk of someone running literally random code they have no idea what does.
But seeing it from developers, it smells of bullshit. The thing they show are always a week of vibing gave them some stuff I could hack up in a weekend. And they could too if they invested a few days of learning e.g. html5, basic css and read the http fetch doc. And the learning cost is a one-time cost - later prototypes they can just bang out. And then they also also have the understanding needed to turn it into a proper product if the prototype pans out.
I disagree. What I could hack over a weekend starting a project, I can do in a couple hours with AI, because starting a project is where the typing bottleneck is, due to all of the boilerplate. I can’t type faster than an LLM.
Also, because there are hundreds of similar projects out there and I won’t get to the parts that make mine unique in a weekend, that’s the perfect use case for “vibe coding”.
I say this as someone who’s not particularly a fan of AI and tries to use it very sparingly.
For me AI is not so much about productivity gains. Where I find it useful instead is to push me past the initial block of starting something from scratch. It’s that initial dopamine rush that the article mentions, from seeing an idea starting to take shape.
In that sense, if I compare projects by time spent on them with or without AI after they are completed, I too would probably find there were no productivity gains. But some of these things I would never get started at all by myself.
If you are a senior developer in a corporation, you know what you have to do, you are an expert in your domain, you rarely start something really new (and when you do, it is only after endless discussions and studies on tools, language, tech stack, architecture). AI is probably not a great help for you.
But even in corporate life, there are a lot of things that are inportant but that you constantly set aside: from planning your career, to honing your communication skills or whatever it is that you could certainly learn to do (with time and dedication) but for some reason you keep postponing because you are not already an expert at them and it takes motivation to learn. That’s where AI found its niche in my life.
I would agree with that.
Especially, “being 70%” finished does not mean you will get a working product at all. If the fundamentale understanding is not there, you will not getting a working product without fundamental rewrites.
I have seen code from such bullshit developers myself. Vibe-coded device drivers where people do not understand the fundamentals of multi-threading. Why and when you need locks in C++. No clear API descriptions. Messaging architectures that look like a rats nest. Wild mix of synchronous and async code. Insistence that their code is self-documenting and needs neither comments nor doc. And: Agressivity when confronted with all that. Because the bullshit taints any working relationship.
It can pop out a pojo based on copy paste of an API document faster than I can.
I wouldn’t trust it for logic though. That’s just asking for trouble.