Can AI Really Build Production Software?

Is Vibe Coding all I need?

That’s the question I’ve been asking myself. I have many years of experience writing code, but have spent the last several years as an engineering manager, not writing code on a daily basis.

Now I’m here all by my lonesome, no longer able to depend on a team of badass devs.. So far, I’ve actively chosen to invest my time and energy into AI first, “Prompt-driven development.” I’m intentionally avoiding the term “vibe coding” here.

When people hear the term “vibe coding,” they may picture a process in which I am casually chatting with the LLM, going with the flow, letting it steer the ship. The only place that ship is going is straight into an iceberg.

My process with the LLM is more akin to pair programming. I don’t review the code line by line, but I try to discern which approach it is taking. I push back often. My prompts steer the direction of the ship. I am constantly on the lookout for icebergs.

With this approach I have been able to make solid progress on my projects. But in the back of my head I am still asking myself: would I be better off getting my hands dirtier, writing the code myself?

This weekend I tried Claude Code for the first time. Sonnet 4 is the top coding LLM available today in my book (subject to change). Claude Code has the best pricing model to utilize Sonnet 4. If you are vibe coding all day, look at their Max plan.

Claude Code and I just spent the last 3 days on a single difficult issue. The most frustrating part is Claude’s enthusiastic confidence after each prompt, proclaiming IT SOLVED IT THIS TIME! Over and over again, it had not solved it. The breakthrough occurred when we finally accepted that our fundamental approach was wrong. It took hours and hours of debugging and QA before Claude was willing to admit this fact.

Would I have come to this conclusion sooner if was coding without help? Will I continue to hit multi-day blockers as I go deeper into this complex project?

Only time will tell.

VibetoLaunch Weekly Updates (6/05/25) -

- New Travis-Vibes Youtube Video!

Interesting Links

"Cloudlflare builds OAuth with Claude and publishes all the prompts" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=

“some thoughts on human-ai relationships and how we're approaching them at openai” https://https://reservoirsamples.substack.com/p/some-thoughts-on-human-ai-relationships

“I'm using agents to write a lot of code now. Just 6 months ago it didn't really work well, so if you haven't tried in a while, this is your sign..” (Lee Robinson Vercel)
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