I think the basic issue for me is that people put this stuff out as if it's some big discovery, and yet my own usage is way different and serves me just fine thank you. These have the feel of a developer who has just discovered development and then want to tell you about all the best tools. But it's not really about showing you the best tools, is it? Rather, it's about riding the hype train and creating slop for more eyeballs.
Respectfully, I think you are being reflexively contrarian or overindexing on the vibe coding hype train. The way vibe coding UX works is basically just having LLMs guess what they need to do to complete a task and then sending it off to do it and try to fix anything that doesn't go according to plan along the way. Nothing big there.
I had started working on an AI devtool product a few months before Cursor took off, I didn't even know about them when I first started, and I hated that such a dumb UX was setting the narrative in this space. LLMs had essentially no ability to decompose and plan tasks at the time, and they weren't fucking sandboxing it!
Terminal agents are actually moving towards the UX I've been building/anticipating for. In March of 2024 I was playing around with GPT4 and saw it oneshot a microservice I asked it to make. I was so excited about the implications of where this stuff could go that I quit my job at google just to start building in this space.
Without getting into all the details, I am pretty convinced there must be some particular way of arranging infrastructure primitives and AI-coding tools in a way that properly decomposes and executes arbitrarily large or complicated tasks (limited only by available time and resources). Claude code is IMO getting closer to that by the week. No iterative change is crazy science or anything but there are some genuinely novel and exciting patterns for computing things underway.
When someone has a YouTube channel about programming with a certain level of polish they are not trying to be a professional programmer, they are trying to be a professional YouTuber.
