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Comment by scosman | Hacker News Reader

yes exactly. Too many people ask AI to one-shot complex tasks, and wonder it behaves like a junior asked to rush something.

I have my own skill: 5 rounds of research/planning/test-planning. Interactive with me in loop for all important decisions. Starts with high level shape, then details. Planning can take 2-3 days of my time, then the implementation agent can take many hours (Opus 4.7). It splits the implementation across many phases/commits, each with its own code-review fix loop. Deep code review at the end can take another hour or two. It opens a PR, Gemini reviews, it reads out and resolves those issues.

Projects still take days or weeks, but 5x faster than doing it all myself.

Edit: the skill - https://github.com/scosman/vibe-crafting

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"yes exactly. Too many people ask AI to one-shot complex tasks, and wonder it behaves like a junior asked to rush something."

Because this version of AI is worth 10 trillion dollars.

While the pragmatic versions from realists you can find all over this thread are ultimately probably less of a speed boost than just having your CEO/local micromanager be conveniently on vacation during critical periods when the work actually gets done.

"Because this version of AI is worth 10 trillion dollars."

i wonder how much the real version of AI is worth. I've got a hinch we're going to find out pretty soon.

Probably still a lot. If not, then all of these people who praise them are just bad developers.

My personal experience with trying to front-load tons of planning and speccing out with LLMs is that at best it's a small improvement on code quality but with considerably more time spent.

As a result I've abandoned the idea of having LLMs generate code except for very small, localized and tightly scoped things. They really can't produce much more than a function or a small module without shitting the bed (last time I vibecoded was with Opus 4.6, Composer 2 and GPT-5.4). I use it almost entirely as another signal in analysis, which naturally makes it fit in better because all the other signals (reading the code, stepping through the code, writing the code myself) are already there so when the LLM points things out the information it actually renders can be taken in much more easily (and seen through more easily when it's false or irrelevant).

I think it's neat that people find fun ways to develop, but I think dressing up vibecoding in a fancy dress and layering SpecLang, sometimes in multiple steps, on top of it, is an exercise in trying to use the tool more instead of trying to use it in its most useful capacity.

I expect you'll be told to try Opus 4.7, and in short, JuSt WaiT FoR ThE NexT MoDel, BRo.

This has been my experience every time I've suggested that there are any sort of inherent ontological/conceptual or computational limits to the sophistication of LLM mimicry.

Even fully planned it’s still no better than a junior dev. You’re leaving out how much back and forth you have the ai do on itself, which you’d have on a junior dev too. In the end does it matter if it’s giving you what you want? Guess not really. But let’s not act like it’s crazy good when you’re still doing a lot of rounds of revisions on something an experienced dev would know to do right the first time.

I think that in general, people need to understand that they need to invest most of their time in the planning phase. High level plan, then spec are the baseline imo

Does the 5x faster including shipping? Or just the work part?

IMO if you are not shipping out faster then the faster work gains are meaningless.

If you are shipping faster, you’re probably picking up more work and shipping everything too fast leading to burnout.

If you're not shipping faster, it's meaningless, and if you are, it's also bad?

If you're not shipping faster it's meaningless for the company.

And if you are, it's bad for the employee.

Is what the above comment actually said.

yup.

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