A low empathy employee
They don’t care about what you care about, you never know what direction they may go. When you are having a incident they may go off on a tangent and fix a minor problem instead of focusing on the mitigation of the incident. They also don’t appreciate the importance of different features and will go off in their own direction like adding useless graphs you don’t care about
Loves to keep generating text
If you don’t tell it specifically to not be verbose it will just keep generating useless text. Particularly when you add a new feature like a textbox it might include a whole paragraph description of it on top. I often find myself prompting it to keep things to one sentence and it is able to condense information relatively well
You become an engineer manager
It feels like the whole process is that you become an engineering manager where you can tell AI to do things and it will follow but its very hard to influence the outcome accurately. For example often performance is a problem due to a lack of empathy it often won’t care about it unless specifically prompted. Once prompted it will implement some random optimisation usually not very effective.
Simultaneously smarter and dumber than you think
Due to the wall of text it produces you will often assume it hasn’t accounted for something but its ability to process information is phenomenal and it likely has thought about it. For example it may implement a feature in a strange way perhaps hidden from view. Then you question it and actually they did it on purpose because of user feedback that you forgot about.
Observability and alerting must be comprehensive
Without a doubt vibe coded software is much less reliable. It would both cause itself it fail by placing overly aggressive limits and by not being performant such as handling requests serially instead of parallelism. Basic engineering concepts. So you will need to clearly alert when things go wrong and fix it either in automated way by tieing the alert to a agentic workflow or just alerting you so you can prompt ai to fix it