This post was originally published on Stack Overflow
A year ago, I set out to test whether all of the hype around vibe coding was real. I decided to stress test AI with a complex design project and really push it to see if AI assistance was the magical tool everyone raved about.
Having been a software developer by origin who pivoted to user experience for developer tools, I gravitated toward the hardest thing I knew: building for developers themselves. Not the to-do apps and shopping lists filling every demo, but something that would actually stress the system. The former are predictable problems dressed up as design work: known inputs, known outputs, a thin interface over basic add-edit-delete mechanics. The shape of the answer is already baked into every tutorial the model has seen.
A developer tool is a different animal. The user isn’t checking items off a list; they’re forming a mental model of a system they’re building, and the interface has to make ambiguity legible instead of hiding it. Multiple layers that have to stay coherent with each other, interactions that cross surfaces where a small change in one place can quietly break something two views away, and underneath it all, a subject that refuses to sit still:
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