A Guide to Gen AI / LLM Vibecoding for Expert Programmers

Summary

I get it, you’re too good to vibe code. You’re a senior developer who has been doing this for 20 years and knows the system like the back of your hand. Or maybe you’re the star individual contributor who is the only person who can ever figure out how to solve the hard problems. Or maybe you’re the professor who created the entire subject of the algorithms you’re implementing. I don’t know you, but I do know that you think you’re too good to vibe code. And guess what, you’re absolutely and totally wrong. Facetious? Maybe… but I will go even further. No, you’re not too good to vibe code. In fact, you’re the only person who should be vibe coding. I would have thought this statement was crazy just a month ago because this label of “expert” coder also applies to me. Just to establish some street cred here, I am the maintainer of over 200 Github packages, totaling over 23,000 stars, am Co-PI of a CS Lab at MIT, was the founding architect at one pretty successful tech startup and am VP leading architecting Dyad in another domain. I clearly know how to program, would leave snide remarks at students and interns when their code was clearly created by LLMs, and was pretty publicly against all of this because these bots are too stupid to know what “correct” even means. But I started picking up this “vibe coding” about a month ago and I found out that it can be a really powerful tool, in the right circumstances and in the right workflow. For the record, I now have about 32 Claude agents continuously running in tmux windows that I can ssh to, so all day long I can just check via laptop or phone and keep plugging along. This was completely unheard of a month ago, but it’s here. This is the expert’s guide to vibe coding for those who are scoffing at those kids who don’t know what they are doing, but also want to start doing it correctly. A Mental Model for LLM Agents: Your Sophomore Year Student/Intern Drop the hype, I’m not here to sell you a ChatGPT so I’m not going to tell you i...