Auditing the code it produces is basically the only effective way to use coding LLMs at this point.

You’re basically playing the role of senior dev code reviewing and editing a junior dev’s code, except in this case the junior dev randomly writes an amalgamation of mostly valid, extremely wonky, and/or complete bullshit code. It has no concept of best practices, or fitness for purpose, or anything you’d expect a junior dev to learn as they gain experience.

Now given the above, you might ask yourself: “Self, what if I myself don’t have the skills or experience of a senior dev?” This is where vibe coding gets sketchy or downright dangerous: if you don’t notice the problems in generated code, you’re doomed to fail sooner or later. If you’re lucky, you end up having to do a big refactoring when you realize the code is brittle. If you’re unlucky, your backend is compromised and your CTO is having to decide whether to pay off the ransomware demands or just take a chance on restoring the latest backup.

If you’re just trying to slap together a quick and dirty proof of concept or bang out a one-shot script to accomplish a task, it’s fairly useful. If you’re trying to implement anything moderately complex or that you intend to support for months/years, you’re better off just writing it yourself as you’ll end up with something stylistically cohesive and more easily maintainable.