This article is knocking down a very expansive claim that most serious (ie: not vibe-coding) developers aren't making. Their point is that LLM agents have not yet reached the point where they can finish a complicated job end-to-end, and that if you want to do a completely hands-off project, where only the LLM generates any code, it takes a lot of prompting effort to accomplish.

This seems true, right now!

But in building out stuff with LLMs, I don't expect (or want) them to do the job end-to-end. I've ~25 merged PRs into a project right now (out of ~40 PRs generated). Most merged PRs I pulled into Zed and cleaned something up. At around PR #10 I went in and significantly restructured the code.

The overall process has been much faster and more pleasant than writing from scratch, and, notably, did not involve me honing my LLM communications skills. The restructuring work I did was exactly the same kind of thing I do on all my projects; until you've got something working it's hard to see what the exact right shape is. I expect I'll do that 2-3 more times before the project is done.

I feel like Kenton Varda was trying to make a point in the way they drove their LLM agent; the point of that project was in part to record the 2025 experience of doing something complicated end-to-end with an agent. That took some doing. But you don't have to do that to get a lot of acceleration from LLMs.