This is a point that really sticks with me. Using it for the sometimes spot on cakewalk segments is a fairly productive win. By the time you stubbornly insist on driving it entirely blackbox with chat and trying to get the right results without actually touching code... Well, even when it works, it's often more work than just doing it yourself.

Someone rebased a UI I worked on in a new version of the UI framework. As a result, there was this one odd gap in the UI in one specific place. A vibe coder spent 3 hours back and forth with the AI trying to get it to correct the gap and finally submitted their merge request. Hundreds and hundreds of lines of CSS. So I declined the merge request, open the gui, looked at the gap, hit f12, adjusted a single padding statement, and it was all good. People are struggling with defining all sorts of criteria and rigging it to let it try and try and try again and hopefully laid out every contingency, every corner case, and spent hours laying the ground work and could have done similar in a more straightforward way.