Cheap vibe coding matters

On X, @corbin_braun said:

If you need the best and most expensive models for AI coding, this article is for you.

I very often read people explaining how they use SOTA models for coding, on high/max most of the time. Here’s my take on it.

”I have the money so why not?”

I understand you think it’s pointless to reduce the AI capability. But if your daily driver needs to be the best model possible, then you’re out of luck when you encounter exceptional problems, because you can’t step up your game anymore. In the meantime, you’re paying way more than needed for the same result someone else could get from a cheap model, a faster model, which would make productivity go up. You’re orders of magnitude more expensive and slower than you could be.

”Otherwise it doesn’t work well”

If you really need the latest model from last week to be productive, that’s a problem: Karpathy coined the term Vibe Coding 10 months ago. Since then, new models have been added that are both fast and cheap for coding, and you didn’t learn to use them, instead hoping that the most capable models would replace that learning. Then guess what: you are being replaced by that AI.

Software Engineering entered the room

I believe there is virtue is using cheap models, just like a tech lead can’t always count on a world class team of developers.

Learn to lead an AI, just like experienced software engineers lead a team. Then you don’t need a team that’s smarter than you are. That’s where experience matters nowadays: not in coding, but in software engineering.

Capable architecture, clean coding conventions, test environments, good design and project organisation: those make a huge difference in the outcome. No matter how smart your AI model, a fast and cheap model with unit tests and a clear code base will do a better job than Opus 4.5 Max could to fix an untested bowl of spaghetti.

An excellent tech lead was always an accelerator for a dev team, and you can be the software engineer that will amplify the outcome of AI coding agents… or you can be the weak link that will be replaced by an AI one day.