deepseek v4 pro - but honestly it is comparable to gpt-5.4-mini, far from GPT5.4 let alone GPT5.5! Its advantage is really just its pricing. I'm going to give Kimi K2.7 a try - with K2.6, even its cloud chat locks up all the time, so it really didn't give me much confidence at all for agentic coding.
What I've experienced was if you let an agent "fix" the problems, and keep vibe coding away, at some point they'll stop working. Fixing one breaks another, and the tests you think you had as guardrails turned out to be useless because they're contradictory. The specifications (hence spec driven coding with AI) become very important. If you get that wrong, the agents will try their best to somehow fit the output to your requests. For simple UI projects, sure, you can quickly see it visually. For anything complex (most real world systems are), there's a lot of reading and re-reading AI produced code. This could be slower and more time consuming, and often cause mental fatigue because there's no way you can gauge the level of THIS particular AI's output, unlike when you're doing PR reviewing for a actual human. You tend to take shortcuts because you know them, how they code, and their strengths and weaknesses. With AI, it's random, and I've personally seen prod going down because of it.
So yes, I think the crowd is anti-AI where it matters. But claiming AI-assisted version could have been deployed 10x faster, I doubt you've really maintained any real world software systems.
I think that's all correct what they're saying. It's not contradictory - writing code has become a commodity to a certain extent. But someone's still responsible for the production systems when it fails. AWS had a couple of big outages last year because of AI. Even with humans reviewing it, review is review. If you're not writing the code, you'll not have spent enough time thinking about edge cases. That's where the most expensive part of software engineering, not coding. Coding being a commodity is indeed analogous to robots in the production line, but those robots have huge teams of mechanical engineers to keep them running. The calibration, the servicing etc.
What's most interesting is now that vibe coding is expensive, will the AI slop go away, gradually?
I'm facing the same problem. I'm spending a lot of time on side projects now precisely because my company is forcing our strongly encouraging everyone to use AI for coding. At some point I found myself complacent enough to accept AI code at face value which scared me. With my side projects, I still use AI, but only when I get stuck, to help me get the aha moment. But most of the time it's, hmm... That works but, I don't think we should do it this way. Very tempting to continue prompting and keep going from there though, I have to say.
I've always wondered how this world works. The person who created something used by companies making hundreds of millions in profits doesn't actually get a share of the wealth generated by his creation. And he has dedicated his life to this, and now having to deal with AI PRs / bug reports, like the rest of us mere mortals. Every cloud provider's biggest offering is Linux instances. But because of free open source software, big corps can pocket every single cent.
Ahhh a fellow Borland Turbo C++ Dev (we weren't called Devs back then!)
I agree. GUI these days are largely driven by how HTML works and we now have a whole generation of UI Devs (frontend devs) who've never known any other way.