This is a challenge which I don't think AI tools like Cursor have cracked yet. They're great for laying "fresh pavement" but it's akin to being a project manager contracting the work out.

Even if I use Cursor (or some other equivalent) and review the code I find my mental model of the system is much more lacking. It actually had a net negative on my productivity as it gave me anxiety at going back to the codebase.

If an AI tool could help a user interactively learn the mental model I think that would be a great step in the right direction.

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ivape 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

but it's akin to being a project manager contracting the work out.

And that's probably the difference between those who are okay with vibe coding and those who aren't. A leader of a company that doesn't care about code quality (elegant code, good tradeoffs, etc) would never have cared if 10 monkeys outputted the code pre-AI or if 10 robot monkeys outputted the code with AI. It's only a developer, of a certain type, that would care to say "pause" in either of those situations.

Out of principal I would not share or build coding tools for these people. They literally did not care all these years about code quality, and the last thing I want to do is enable them on any level.

	▲	woah 3 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Or maybe if you are good at delegating and reviewing code and stepping in to do a deep dive by hand when needed to maintain understanding, then you can use LLMs to greatly increase your speed.
	▲	marcosdumay 3 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Well, now they can have their way without a pesky developer second-guessing every decision of them. I don't want to participate on it either, but I'm glad they'll have the chance to make things their way with all the consequences it brings unfiltered.

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catigula 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

An AI tool can both navigate a legacy codebase and help explain it to you successfully currently, right now, if you're doing it correctly.

I've contracted some of this understanding of pieces/intellectual work out to Claude code many, many times successfully.

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HuwFulcher 3 days ago | parent [-]

Yes it’s definitely possible now. My point was that people need to move past “vibe coding” to using the AI as what it should be, an assistant

	▲	lukaslalinsky 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		I don't think people are realistically "vibe coding" production apps. You see a lot of hype, and I'm sure there is growing number of people without software development skills using Claude Code, but those are not the people writing important software. Even the people from Anthropic encourage programmers to first use CC as analytics/research tool, not for writing code. Once you get a feel what it can do, you will feel comfortable feeding it chunks of work you want to delegate, but realistically never more than you can review. Yes, you can ask it to build the next Instagram, but you will very quickly find out it's not going to work.