> the "last step" is what takes the majority of time and effort

Having worked extensively with vibe-coded software, the main problem for me is that I have tuned-off from the ai-code, and I dont see any skin-in-the-game for me. This is dangerous because it becomes increasingly harder to root-cause and debug problems because that muscle is atrophying. use-it or lose-it applies to cognitive skills (coding/debugging). Now, I lean negatively to ai-code because, while it seduces us with fast progress in the first 80%, the end outcome is questionable in terms of quality. Finally, ai-coding encourages a prompt-and-test or trial-and-error approach to software engineering which is frustrating and those with experience would prefer to get it right by design.

I also wonder about this for myself. My feeling is that my debug skills are also atrophied a bit. But I would split debugging into two buckets:

1. Debugging my own code or obvious behavior with other libraries.

2. Debugging pain-in-the-ass behavior with other libraries.

My patience with the latter is significantly less now, and so is perhaps my skill in debugging them. Libraries that change their apis for no apparent reason, libraries which use nonstandard parameter names, libraries which aren’t working as advertised.

It's also possible to heavily influence the design and what is sent to the AI model in the prompt to help ensure the output is the way you would like it. In existing codebases with your style and patterns or even in the prompt, it's possible to heavily influence the output so that you can hopefully get the best of both worlds.