I think writing code was never slow. Or atleast never the slowest part of the overall process.

Vibe coding might be fast, but thats only if you wish to pretend that coders deploy to production directly within minutes of writing code without product discussions, automated builds, CI/CD, code review, production testing, UAT, regression testing, security testing etc.

In reality when you factor in all these things, which are absolutely necessary if you don't want you product to break every new release and lose users permanently. You have to do the same drills as you always did.

To that end, unless you are building something very large, coding velocity is largely irrelevant.

I would also argue that the OPs comment describes “hacking” not “writing code”.

They could escape that loop by employing software development skillsets, for example TDD or perhaps using the debugger instead of pounding away at a compiler.

Usually when people pound at a compiler it’s because they don’t know what they’re doing or how software even works.