In my personal experience, agentic coding wasn’t useful, but using a chat inference, was. I still need to be the critical path, but the LLM has, indeed, become a major force multiplier.

A few minutes ago, I submitted an app for review, that I started work on, alone, in February. The Quality of the new version is astounding. I’m absolutely thrilled.

It’s a full rewrite (backend server, and frontend client) of a fairly large app that’s been shipping for a couple of years, and that took over two years, to originally write.

I wouldn’t have even tried it, without an LLM. That made all the difference. The majority of the work was done with the $20/month ChatGPT Plus subscription, but the last few days, as I developed supporting materials and Web sites, I used the $100/month Pro level. After my work, over the last few months, the upgrade was a “no brainer.”

But, at every step of the way, I needed to be there, to intimately review and manage the interaction with the LLM. There’s no way that I could trust it to “just do it.”

I’m sure that, sooner or later (likely sooner), LLMs will have progressed to the point that I can trust them to vibe-code a project like this, but I guarantee, that they aren’t quite there, yet.

To be fair, I know that I may have much higher standards than a fairly significant number of developers, but the end product of my work is about as far from “AI slop” as you can get.