A couple of week ago, I had a little down time and thought about a new algorithm I wanted to implement. In my head it seemed simple enough that 1) I thought the solution was already known, and 2) it would be fairly easy to write. So I asked Claude to "write me a python function that does Foo". I spent a whole morning going back and forth getting crap and nothing at all like what I wanted.

I don't know what inspired me, but I just started to pretend that I was talking to one one of my junior engineers. I first asked for a much simpler function that was on the way to what I wanted (well, technically, it was the mathematical inverse of what I wanted), then I asked it to modify it to add one different transform, and then another, and then another. And then finally, once the function was doing what I wanted, I asked it to write me the inverse function. And it got it right.

What was cool about it, is that it turned out to be more complex linear algebra and edge cases than I originally thought, and it would have been weeks for me to figure all of that out. But using it as a research tool and junior engineer in one was the key.

I think if we go down the "vibe coding" route, we will end up with hoards of juniors who don't understand anything and the stuff they produce with AI will be garbage and brittle. But using AI as a tool is starting to feel more compelling to me.