1000% this. Today LLMs are like enthusiastic, energetic, over-confident, well-read junior engineers.
Does it take effort to work with them and get them to be effective in your code base? Yes. But is there a way to lead them in such a way that your "team" (you in this case) gets more done? Yes.
But it does take effort. That's why I love "vibe engineering" as a term because the engineering (or "senior" or "lead" engineering) is STILL what we are doing.
I would love to know if and how you disagree. I am (I thought obviously) making a jump here from her desire to make FLOW-MATIC human-readable. Also, I don't believe that AI will take developers's jobs, but I do believe a developer using AI will replace ones not using it...so I'm intentionally provocative there, yes.
It's probably true in our industry too - I'm sure that when people started using programming languages instead of writing machine code people looked down on them too.
This will be another abstraction layer that MANY people will use and be able to accomplish things that would have been impossible to do in a reasonable amount of time in machine code.
Haha I'm glad to hear it, because I do the same of course.
What I might not have mentioned is that I've spent the last 5 years and 20,000 or so hours building an IDE from scratch. Not a fork of VSCode, mind you, but the real deal: a new "kernel" and integration layer with abilities that VSCode and its forks can't even dream of. It's a proper race and I'm about to drop the hammer on you.
Author and Kilo Code team member here - this is a much better explanation of what I mean. And honestly, it's a quick phrase I've been using that is shorthand really for THIS much better-written take.
Our plan is to be a superset of Cline and Roo's features (we already have all the major features from both) [0]
We also have our own provider, which means no need to bring your own API keys (you can if you like, but it is batteries included by default) and we're not charging anything on top of the API pricing. Instead of monetizing on individual developers, we want it to be free for them and make money eventually off enterprise contracts [1]
Yes - with our built-in provider, we provide all the models that OpenRouter provides but without OpenRouter's 5% markup. We provide them at cost (the AI provider cost)
maybe you could answer a question about kilo usage: If I choose Google Gemini as the API provider and give it my Gemini API key, why does it say that I'm low on credits (and I get API request failures immediately)? As far as I understand gemini 2.5 pro preview is free to use. (and in Cline I'm able to choose Google Gemini as the API provider & provide my API key and it will successfully make API requests)
Does it take effort to work with them and get them to be effective in your code base? Yes. But is there a way to lead them in such a way that your "team" (you in this case) gets more done? Yes.
But it does take effort. That's why I love "vibe engineering" as a term because the engineering (or "senior" or "lead" engineering) is STILL what we are doing.