Comment by azath92

I often find that the hard part of writing big, persistant, code is not the writing but the building of a mental model (what the author calls "theory building"). This challenge multiplies when you are working with old code, or code others is working on.

Much of my mental space is spent building and updating the mental model. This changing of my mental model might look like building a better understanding of something i had glossed over in the past, or something that had been changed by someone else. Or it is i think the fundamental first step before actually changing any lines of code, you have to at least have an idea for how you want the mental model to change, and then make the code match that intended change. Same for debugging, finding a mismatch between your mental model and the reality as represented by the code.

And at the end of the day, AI coding tools can help with the actual writing, but the naive vibecoding approach as noted is that they avoid having to have a mental model at all. This is a falacy. They work best when you do have a mental model that is good enough to pass good context to them, and they are most useful when you carefully align their work with your model over time, or use them to explore/understand the code and build your mental model better/faster/with greater clarity.