> I spent a lot more time up front thinking through specs.

Presumably you didn’t work like this before but now you are? Have you tried simply doing this when manually coding? It’s possible you’re getting a speed up from embracing good practices.

We already invented languages for succinctly describing what the computer should do. They’re call programming languages.

“The code is the documentation” is not a joke. Logic that’s useful in the real world is complex and messy. You need additional documentation (why did the code end up like it is, etc) but code is the most expressive way we’ve got for describing how a computer should work.

There was an article on here not too long ago - I can’t find it now - where the authors discussed how they leaned full in on it and were submitting 20k+ line PRs to open source projects in languages they were not very familiar with.

However, they mentioned you had to let go of reviewing every line of every PR. I read that and was fine with holding off on full vibe coding for now. Nobody intelligent would pay for that and no competent developer would operate like that.

I have a couple coworkers big on it. The lesser skilled ones are miserable to work with. I’ve kept my same code review process but number of comments left has at least 5x’d (not just from me, either). And I’m not catching everything - I get fatigued and call it done. Duplicated logic, missed edge cases, arbitrary patterns and conventions, etc. The high skilled ones less so, but I still don’t look forward to reviewing their PRs anymore. Too much work on my end.

There are many devs who are more focused on results than being correct. These are the ones I’ve seen most drawn to LLMs/agents. There’s a place for these devs, but having worked on an aging startups codebase, I hope there aren’t too many.