I disagree and I think the distinction is what we mean by "helpful in software engineering".

Is Fable helpful in that it can write some code that does what I told it to do? Yes, obviously. I don't think anyone is arguing that, because it's trivial to see that if you tell a frontier model to do a coding task, it usually does it well enough.

Is Fable helpful in that over the span of six months of using it, the codebase and my brain's relation to it is in a better state than if I had not used it? Well, I don't know. In this case I understand the code less, and the code is probably in a poor state, but it is further along in the feature list. Whether that tradeoff is a net benefit to whatever metric you care about is debatable.

I think most will agree that the extreme case in which you understand zero and the codebase is spaghetti (true vibecoding), but it has a bunch of features, is not good for most professional contexts, because we have seen this results in a high bugrate and eventual loss of trust in the tool and inability for the AI to maintain invariants due to context size.

So somewhere on the spectrum between no-AI and vibecoding is probably ideal. Where on the spectrum is the argument, and everyone is going to have their own opinions based on their own domains. I don't see this as anyone being wrong or emotional.

> it's trivial to see that if you tell a frontier model to do a coding task, it usually does it well enough

So you do not disagree? You agree 100%? Yes, it is trivial to see. Hence my near-anaphylactic reaction to articles like this, which specifically claim that it is NOT useful. Do you just mentally filter that out or something?

> Is [..] the codebase and my brain's relation to it is in a better state than if I had not used it?

But now this is a different question. It will not be the same, that's for sure. With new tools we must learn new patterns, new best practises. I have come around to the opinion that we must collectively move to a higher level of abstraction and accept that we will understand the code less - but I don't agree it must necessarily be worse. That will all depend on the new techniques we discover and apply.

> So somewhere on the spectrum between no-AI and vibecoding is probably ideal. Where on the spectrum is the argument, and everyone is going to have their own opinions based on their own domains. I don't see this as anyone being wrong or emotional.

I think that anyone planting a big flag at 0 (no AI) in 2026, with what we have available, is indeed doing it for emotional reasons, and when they claim there's no benefit being anywhere else, they're wrong. Which is what the article we're talking about is doing - hence my, and other's, scathing reaction.