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Comment by 59nadir

7 hours ago

My personal experience with trying to front-load tons of planning and speccing out with LLMs is that at best it's a small improvement on code quality but with considerably more time spent.

As a result I've abandoned the idea of having LLMs generate code except for very small, localized and tightly scoped things. They really can't produce much more than a function or a small module without shitting the bed (last time I vibecoded was with Opus 4.6, Composer 2 and GPT-5.4). I use it almost entirely as another signal in analysis, which naturally makes it fit in better because all the other signals (reading the code, stepping through the code, writing the code myself) are already there so when the LLM points things out the information it actually renders can be taken in much more easily (and seen through more easily when it's false or irrelevant).

I think it's neat that people find fun ways to develop, but I think dressing up vibecoding in a fancy dress and layering SpecLang, sometimes in multiple steps, on top of it, is an exercise in trying to use the tool more instead of trying to use it in its most useful capacity.

I expect you'll be told to try Opus 4.7, and in short, JuSt WaiT FoR ThE NexT MoDel, BRo.

This has been my experience every time I've suggested that there are any sort of inherent ontological/conceptual or computational limits to the sophistication of LLM mimicry.