I really enjoy having the AI write the spec then I write the code.

Reviewing code is pain, reviewing requirements and giving feedback feels more productive. I have to confront the full shape of the problem and I usually discover a few cans of worms that make me rethink my approach.

Yeah, I'll talk out design with AI in a brainstorming session.

Then I'll usually go and implement at least one piece of that. If I get stuck, I'll ask for some help. Then, once I'm happy with it, I'll ask the AI to review what I came up with. Then typically ask it to stamp the pattern around the codebase. And often to just iterate through writing out unit tests.

So I just did this for getting dense output from interpolants for an ODE integrator that I maintain. I did the work to make Tsit5 work by hand. I asked AI to stamp out the same pattern for DP5 and BS3, because it was just gene splicing those changes into a very similar RK integrator. I can review the diffs and see that it faithfully stamped out the same pattern with two prompts and a couple of minutes.

I'm still maintaining pretty strong contact with the codebase by doing a lot of my own programming, and fighting with the design while I'm writing that first piece of it, but then I use the AI to stamp out the mindlessly repetitive stuff.

That just seemed like the obvious way to me to go about programming with AI rather than pure-vibecoding and never touching anything other than prompts.

Also, you probably run out of tokens a lot faster if you're pure-vibecoding.

Plus you should spend some time debugging your own code. Even if AI could find and fix a bug in a minute or three that would take you 20 minutes, it is generally going to be better for you to burn that 20 minutes on trying to fix it before asking for help.

Of course, unlike another poster in this comment thread, I never cheated in college and spent a lot of time on "academic" side projects that weren't part of any course I was taking.

Once the vibecoders and cheats are done spamming a billion lines of AI generated code into industry, there's probably going to be positions for people who can (with AI assistance) sort out the mess and get production stable again.