Would you fly in a vibe coded airplane?
Would you fly in a vibe coded airplane?
That question has been rattling around my head as I've watched the AI coding discourse split into two camps: "AI writes all my code now" and "AI is overhyped garbage."
The reality is messier. After months of building real projects with AI agents on GitHub Copilot, I've found that the developers getting the most out of AI aren't the ones who went all-in on autonomy. They're the ones who learned when to use it and when not to.
I wrote up the framework I use — four modes of working with AI, from hand saw to chainsaw. The key insight: staying in one mode all the time will slow you down.
A single line of code is faster to change by hand than to describe to an agent. Some things are harder to explain than to code. And sometimes you don't know what you want until you start writing it yourself.
The inverse is equally true. Hand-typing boilerplate when an agent can generate it in seconds is a waste.
The skill isn't using AI. It's knowing when to use which mode.