After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand

Summary

Most people’s journey with AI coding starts the same: you give it a simple task. You’re impressed. So you give it a large task. You’re even more impressed.You open X and draft up a rant on job displacement.If you’ve persisted past this point: congratulations, you understand AI coding better than 99% of people.Serious engineers using AI to do real work and not just weekend projects largely also follow a predictable development arc.Still amazed at the big task you gave it, you wonder if you can keep giving it bigger and bigger tasks. Maybe even that haunting refactor no one wants to take on?But here’s where the curtain starts to crinkle.On the one hand, you’re amazed at how well it seems to understand you. On the other hand, it makes frustrating errors and decisions that clearly go against the shared understanding you’ve developed.You quickly learn that being angry at the model serves no purpose, so you begin to internalize any unsatisfactory output.“It’s me. My prompt sucked. It was under-specified.” “If I can specify it, it can build it. The sky’s the limit,” you think.So you open Obsidian and begin drafting beefy spec docs that describe the feature in your head with impressive detail. Maybe you’ve put together a full page of a prompt, and spent half an hour doing so.But you find that spec-driven development doesn’t work either. In real life, design docs and specs are living documents that evolve in a volatile manner through discovery and implementation. Imagine if in a real company you wrote a design doc in 1 hour for a complex architecture, handed it off to a mid-level engineer (and told him not to discuss the doc with anyone), and took off on vacation.Not only does an agent not have the ability to evolve a specification over a multi-week period as it builds out its lower components, it also makes decisions upfront that it later doesn’t deviate from. And most agents simply surrender once they feel the problem and solution has gotten away from them (though this rar...