The best answer is each has its uses. Using codex to do bulk edits is dumb because it takes forever, etc etc
Does that help you? I doubt it. But there you go.
Let's call it the skeptical public? We've been listening to a group of people rave about how revolutionary these tools are, how they're able to perform senior level developer work, how good their code is, and how they're able to work autonomously through the use of sub-agents (i.e. vibe coding), without ever providing evidence that would support any of those grandiose claims.
But then I use these tools myself[1] and I speak to real developers who have used them and our evaluation centers around lukewarm, e.g. good at straightforward, junior level tasks, or good for prototyping, or good for initially generating tests, or good for answering certain types of questions, or good for one-off scripts, but approximately none of them would trust these LLMs to implement a more complex feature like a mid-level or senior developer would without very extensive guidance and hand-holding that takes longer than just doing it ourselves.
Given the overwhelming absence of evidence, the most charitable conclusion I can come to is that the vast majority of people making these claims have simply gone from being 0.2X developers to being 0.3X developers who happen to generate 5X more code per unit of time.
[1] e.g. my reply to https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=45651948
To me, the tool inherently makes sense and vibes with my own personality. It allows me to write code that I would otherwise procrastinate on. It allows me to turn ideas into reality, so much faster.
Maybe you're just hyper focused on metrics? Productivity, especially when dealing with code, is hard to quanitfy. This is a new paradigm and so it's also hard to compare apples to oranges. Does this help?
The people I talked to use a wide variety of environments and their experience is similar across the board, whether they're working in Nodejs, React, Vue, Ruby, PHP, Java, Elixir, or Python.
> Productivity, especially when dealing with code, is hard to quanitfy.
Indeed, that's why I think most people claiming these obscene benefits are really bad at evaluating their own performance and/or started from a really low baseline.
I always think back to a study I read a while ago where people without ADHD were given stimulant medication and reported massive improvements in productivity but objective measurements showed that their real-world performance was equal to, or slightly lower than their baseline.
I think it's very relevant to the psychology behind this AI worship. Some people are being elevated from a low baseline whilst others are imagining the benefits.
> there are also products being made are actually versatile, complex, and completely vibe-coded.
Which ones? I'm looking for repositories that are at least partially video-documented to see the author's process in action.