AI Is Like a Crappy Consultant

Summary

AI Is Like a Crappy ConsultantPosted 5/12/25I decided to finally give vibe coding a try. I’ve barely written any code since I hired developers at Puppet in like 2009. And I’ve been a staunch AI/LLM skeptic. But I figured I should at least be an educated skeptic.After a false start, and a couple of months of periodic usage, I’ve come to some conclusions about it. The first one is the most important:You should treat AI like an untrustworthy consultant.Think of this scenario: You need help with your company’s core product. You have to bring in an outside expert, either just as another body, or more likely, because they have knowledge your team doesn’t. What do you do?Give them commit access and let them work unsupervised? Of course not.At the least, you have someone sit by their side, checking every line.More likely, you don’t even let them touch the keyboard. After all, you want more than the help – you want your team trained up so they don’t need that help next time. The only way you’ll get that is if your team does the work, even if someone else is telling them what to do.That’s how I consulted at Puppet: I show up, I walk you through all the work, and when I leave you have more than a functioning system; you actually know how to use it. Sure, it was faster and easier to do all the work myself. But no one ever learned anything then.All the coding I’ve done with AI help is in Swift, using SwiftUI, to build iOS apps. I’ve never worked with anything like any of that – I’ve not used any of the specific tech (other than an iPhone as a user). I’ve never used a UI framework. I’ve never worked in statically typed languages. And I’ve barely ever worked in compiled languages. So, it seemed like a solid use case for getting some fast help.My first try used Cursor, and let it edit everything.After a few iterations, I had a bare-bones application. But… I felt like I was pushing around a bag full of bolts. There was definitely stuff in there. But I didn’t even know how to th...